WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Wednesday proposed charging schools $70,000 the first time they recommend a foreign student for Optional Practical Training (OPT) and $30,000 for every later recommendation, a fee structure the department says is meant to choke off fraud and stop the program from operating as a side door into U.S. jobs.
The notice is scheduled for publication in the Federal Register on Thursday, October 7. It is a proposed rule and not yet in force. Public comments run from Oct. 8 through Nov. 9, with a separate 60-day window for paperwork comments. After that, DHS would review the record and could revise the text before issuing a final rule. If finalized as written, the fees would take effect 60 days after that final rule appears in the Federal Register, and only for designated school official recommendations dated on or after the effective date.
Students already approved for training, or already holding a school recommendation issued before that date, would not be billed for the existing period. A later recommendation — including a science, technology, engineering and mathematics extension — would trigger the charge.
Under the proposal, the bill lands first on schools certified by Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program, not on the employer and not automatically on the student. A designated school official could not enter an OPT recommendation in the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System until the school had paid. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services would not grant the employment authorization document if the fee had not been paid. The charge is tied to the recommendation, not to a particular job, so a change of employer alone would not create a new bill.
DHS acknowledges that schools could pass the cost to the F-1 student, to employers, or across the student body, and says that pass-through would itself discourage people whose main aim is work rather than study. Students would still file Form I-765 and pay the existing application fee. Money collected under the new rule would go to the Treasury as a miscellaneous receipt. ICE says it has no statutory authority to keep the funds for enforcement.
A school could seek a refund if the student never receives an employment card, but only after the recommendation is pulled from the system. Once the card is issued, the fee would not be refunded. SEVP’s decision on a refund request would be final and not appealable.
“Optional Practical Training was never meant to be a back door into the American workforce, a subsidy for cheap labor, or a prize for those who game the system,” a DHS spokesperson said in announcing the proposal. “DHS is upskilling OPT to require foreign students to justify their worth to employers. American workers should not have to compete against a program that has been turned into a pipeline for cheap foreign labor.” Dhs
The rule itself is blunter about the alternative. Without the fees, the department wrote, it “cannot operate OPT consistent with its focus on preventing fraud and may shut down the program entirely.” Elsewhere it says the F-1 visa “was never intended to provide a pathway to employment in the United States,” and that “the large-scale replacement of American workers through systemic abuse of the OPT program undermines the U.S. economy.”
OPT lets an F-1 student work in a job related to the major, for up to 12 months at a given education level, before or after graduation. Qualifying STEM graduates can add 24 months. Unlike the H-1B program, OPT has no statutory cap. In 2024, ICE reported 194,554 students with OPT employment authorization who reported working, up from 160,627 in 2023, and 165,524 students in STEM OPT — nearly double the annual H-1B numerical limit of 85,000. About one in five of the 1.4 million F-1 students in higher education used OPT that year.
The department anchors the proposal in fraud cases it says the existing system cannot keep up with. It cites a 2020 conviction of a Chinese businesswoman who supplied false employment papers to at least 2,693 people, mostly Chinese students seeking OPT; ICE arrests of 15 students that year in what it called Operation OPTical Illusion; reporting on shell companies that together employed nearly 4,000 OPT students; and a Homeland Security Investigations review that flagged more than 10,000 students working for highly suspect employers, including empty buildings, residential addresses listed as worksites, and “pay-to-stay” arrangements. About 6,186 certified schools are split across roughly 60 territories, typically with one field representative each.
The fee is also framed as labor policy. The notice cites a September 2025 presidential proclamation on H-1B entry that said the specialty-worker program “has been deliberately exploited to replace, rather than supplement, American workers with lower-paid, lower-skilled labor,” and notes unemployment of 6.1% and 7.5% among recent computer science and computer engineering graduates ages 22 to 27. DHS says it set the initial OPT amount to be comparable to the H-1B fee so training would not become the cheaper route around that charge. It also points to the payroll-tax exemption that can apply to F-1 workers in their first five calendar years, which critics say makes those hires cheaper than Americans.
Curricular Practical Training is left alone for now, though the department says it will keep watching that program. Small schools would not be exempt. DHS estimates 56% of certified schools are small entities and says an exemption would leave fraud risk in place. The department calls the fee a first step and says it may add further rules later.
Comments go to regulations.gov under docket ICEB-2026-0100.
Author: Mario Lotmore
