8 Arrests From 104,049 National-Security Visa Flags, Inspector General Finds
October 6, 2026 · Frisian News
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
A DHS Inspector General report found ICE received 3,145,375 visa overstay leads between 2021 and 2024, classified 104,049 as national security or public safety threats, and arrested eight people. A September 2021 memo from then-Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas had narrowed enforcement to a tiny Priority 1 category, leaving 96.7 percent of leads uninvestigated.
ICE received 3,145,375 visa overstay leads between fiscal years 2021 and 2024, according to the DHS Office of Inspector General. Of those, 104,049 were classified as potential national security or public safety threats. Eight people were arrested.
A September 2021 memo from then-DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas directed ICE to pursue only a narrow "Priority 1" category of leads. The result, as documented in the OIG report issued September 29, was that 3,041,326 leads, or 96.7 percent of the total, were classified as non-priority; of those non-priority leads sent to ICE's Enforcement and Removal Operations, five were investigated, resulting in two arrests.
The memo said ICE's limited resources should focus on those "posing a threat to national security, public safety, and border security." The OIG's figures do not support that claim. Of the 104,049 cases the agency itself had flagged as security or public safety concerns, fewer than 0.5 percent were investigated.
The directive produced poor results even within the limits it set. Of fewer than 1,800 leads formally classified as Priority 1, ICE investigated just 84, producing two arrests. Of the full pool of national-security-flagged cases, the OIG found only 496 investigations were opened.
Part of the failure was structural. At the end of fiscal year 2024, ICE could not refer 194 of 205 identified Priority 1 leads because address information was missing. The OIG had flagged the same data-collection problem in a September 2023 report and again in March 2025.
The report includes concrete examples of what went unfollowed. A Honduran national entered the United States in 2022 on a B-2 tourist visa, was later charged with rape, assault and sexual offenses in Maryland, and was not detained until September 2023, eight months after his visa expired. A Jamaican national convicted in a loaded-firearm case and a Chilean national convicted of fraud and burglary both disappeared and could not be located by ICE.
Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, told Newsweek she had been analyzing the cases of terrorists who had been removed and found that "two-thirds of those arrested and removed in recent years arrived under the Biden administration, sometimes on temporary visas." Jeremy Beck, co-president of NumbersUSA, told Newsweek the Mayorkas guidelines "effectively told ICE to ignore anyone, including visa overstays, who didn't fall within their narrow priority categories," leaving the country "more vulnerable to the 'worst of the worst,' who could more easily disappear into a growing illegal population."
David Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, told Newsweek that significant investigative time is spent on leads where the individual has already left the country, and that the same resources could produce more high-priority arrests elsewhere. Greg Chen, senior director of government relations at the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told Newsweek that no administration has had the staffing to pursue every overstay lead, and that targeting long-established residents does not make communities safer. Almost half a million foreign nationals overstayed their visas and remained in the United States in Fiscal Year 2024, according to the latest DHS visa overstay report.
In four years, the agency tasked with pursuing the people it had already flagged as security threats managed eight arrests.
Published October 6, 2026 · Frisian News