DHS Watchdog: ICE Investigated Just 496 of 104,000 High-Risk Visa Overstay Leads From 2021 to 2024

The Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General released a report on September 29, 2026, finding that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement took almost no action on millions of visa overstay leads between fiscal years 2021 and 2024, a period that largely overlaps with Joe Biden's presidency.

The numbers are confirmed by the watchdog's own report (OIG-26-38) and cited by DHS, AP7AM and Newsweek. ICE received 3,145,375 nonimmigrant overstay leads over the four years. Of those, 104,049, about 3.3 percent, were flagged as potential national security or public safety concerns, a category known as Priority 1.

Only 496 investigations were opened from that Priority 1 pool. Those investigations led to eight arrests. The remaining 3,041,326 leads, 96.7 percent of the total, were classified as non-priority. Of 2,837,188 non-priority leads sent to ICE's Enforcement and Removal Operations, just five were investigated after being flagged as possible public safety threats, resulting in two more arrests.

What drove the numbers

The OIG traces the collapse in enforcement to a September 2021 ICE directive, issued under then-DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, instructing agents to pursue only leads posing a threat to national security, public safety, or border security. Everything else went unaddressed by design.

But the report also says the policy wasn't the whole story. "When ICE did attempt to pursue action on a lead, it encountered challenges verifying addresses and locating the foreign nationals present in the United States," the OIG wrote. "Further, ICE did not have sufficient resources to pursue all overstay leads."

The directive's stated rationale was to focus scarce resources on the highest-risk cases, a defensible triage approach in principle. The actual results show that even within the narrowed Priority 1 category, ICE investigated fewer than 500 of 104,000 flagged leads. Resource limits and address-verification failures, not just the policy's scope, appear to have limited enforcement across the board.

DHS's political framing

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem seized on the findings. "The degree of the Biden Administration's dereliction of duty, which needlessly put American lives at risk, is staggering and enraging," Noem said in a statement highlighted by DHS on Monday, October 5. She said the Trump administration "will target and remove as many illegal aliens as possible to make America safe again."

AP7AM's coverage noted that Noem's characterization "represents the administration's political interpretation of the report," while the underlying review was conducted independently by the DHS Inspector General's office. That's a fair distinction. The raw numbers are the OIG's; the framing of "dereliction of duty" and "needlessly put American lives at risk" is Noem's.

AP7AM also flagged a caveat worth keeping: the figures concern leads involving potential overstays, not confirmed violations, and should not be read as proof that every flagged individual actually broke immigration law or posed a genuine threat. Newsweek made a similar point, noting that Priority 1 classification "does not necessarily mean an immigrant has a criminal record" but could instead reflect a flag from the U.S. or a foreign government.

The missing defense

Mayorkas is currently a visiting fellow at Harvard University's Institute of Politics, according to Newsweek, which reported reaching out to him and to the school for comment on the findings. No response from Mayorkas appears in the available reporting, so his direct rebuttal to the OIG's conclusions is not part of the public record yet.

Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, told Newsweek the report "validates the need for the much more vigorous interior enforcement by ICE that is happening under Trump." She argued the Mayorkas-era policy was "irresponsible" and should have let ICE prioritize more cases. The OIG report itself does not render a verdict on whether the 2021 directive was the right call, only that its execution left the large majority of flagged leads, including those tied to national security, uninvestigated.

Where things stand now

A separate DHS overstay report for fiscal year 2024, cited by Breitbart, found roughly half a million foreign nationals overstayed their visas and remained in the country that year. Newsweek reported that DHS under the Trump administration is now pursuing overstay cases more aggressively, including arresting people who show up seeking to adjust their immigration status or renew visas.

What the sources do not establish is how many of the original 3.1 million leads from 2021 to 2024 have since been located or resolved. Newsweek said it asked DHS directly whether the individuals ICE previously failed to find have since been identified. That answer isn't in the record yet, and it's the obvious next data point for anyone tracking whether the current enforcement posture is actually closing the gap the inspector general documented.