The Arithmetic of Not Looking
Between fiscal years 2021 and 2024, Immigration and Customs Enforcement received 3,145,375 leads on foreign nationals suspected of overstaying a nonimmigrant visa. It opened 496 investigations and made eight arrests. That is the finding of OIG-26-38, a Homeland Security Inspector General audit released September 29, and the ratio deserves to be said slowly. Roughly one arrest for every 393,000 leads.
The machinery was not idle. Each lead went through 20 government and commercial database queries before being sorted into Priority 1 through 9, or the catch-all Non-Priority 10. Only 104,049 leads (3.3 percent) earned a ranking from 1 to 9, and ICE deemed 21,885 of all leads viable, under one percent. The audit blames a September 2021 memo from then Secretary Mayorkas that narrowed enforcement to threats against national security, public safety, and border security. Viable leads fell from 20,648 in FY2021 to 207 in FY2024. Executive Order 14148 canceled that memo on January 20, 2025, so the audit describes a policy that no longer exists. ICE makes that point itself, and we will return to ICE.
A List Nobody Arrests From
Even the top tier produced little. HSI identified 1,769 Priority 1 leads, opened 84 investigations, and made two arrests. The other 2,837,188 leads went to Enforcement and Removal Operations, which deemed five of them public safety threats and investigated all five. Two ended in arrests. Two of the remaining three subjects are fugitives, and the third later became a legal permanent resident.
Meanwhile, ERO arrested 16,458 people during the same four years who were later identified as overstays, through ordinary operations such as worksite enforcement, none of it driven by an overstay lead. HSI added 446 more through earlier-year leads and unrelated investigations. This column’s inference, drawn from the report’s Tables 4, 6, and 8, is that overstays get arrested mostly when someone is found for another reason, and almost never because a list said where to look.
Priority One, Address Unknown
The audit’s explanation is mundane and damning. At the end of FY2024, HSI could not refer 194 of its 205 Priority 1 leads, due in part to insufficient address information. ICE officials said the addresses supplied by Customs and Border Protection are often hotels or resorts.
This is not a new discovery. The same office flagged address failures in OIG-23-47 in September 2023 and in OIG-25-21 in March 2025, and reports both sets of recommendations implemented as of May 2026. A referral failure rate above 94 percent on the highest-risk tier suggests that “implemented” is carrying a great deal of weight.
Money enters here. ICE officials told auditors they lacked the resources to pursue every lead, then could not say how much support would be needed, because they did not track what they spent on overstay leads. In July 2025, Public Law 119-21 gave DHS almost $30 billion to bolster ICE immigration operations, overstay enforcement included. The audit’s single recommendation is a plan to increase Priority 1 investigations. ICE concurred and promised the plan by September 30, 2027.
Two Documents, One Agency, Several Versions
ICE’s formal response, dated August 26, 2026 and reproduced in the report’s Appendix C, argues the audit has limited utility because it covers a period under the prior administration. It says ICE complies with Executive Order 14161, and its footnote cites a 2026 signing date and a Federal Register page of 90 FR 845. The Federal Register says otherwise. The order was signed January 20, 2025, and published January 30, 2025, at 90 FR 8451 (document 2025-02009). The memo’s own hyperlink has 2025 in its path.
The order’s text raises a second question. As published, it never uses the word overstay. It directs vetting and screening, and Section 2(c) calls for removal of aliens from countries identified in a report under Section 2(b). ICE says it also follows similar directives it does not name, so it may be relying on something else. On the page it cites, the support looks thin. That is our reading of the published text.
The two agencies also differ on what ICE promised. OIG’s Appendix B summarizes ICE’s plan as prioritizing overstays tied to national security, fraud, smuggling, worksite enforcement, human trafficking, or “other anomalies” within HSI’s portfolio. ICE’s own memo says “other authorities.” One word, in a document meant to record a commitment, and neither explains the change.
Then the counts. CBP’s reported suspected in-country overstays (Figure 1) total 1,959,753 across the four years, against 3,145,375 leads in ICE’s data. In FY2022, CBP’s figure of 795,167 exceeds ICE’s 791,723 leads, while the other three years show ICE with far more. The audit does not reconcile them. Its footnote 4 says CBP’s annual numbers cover only air and sea admissions, though the report never says that accounts for the gap. We cannot resolve it from public records, so it stays an open discrepancy and not a conclusion.
Three million names, eight arrests, and an agency that cannot agree with its auditors, its own paperwork, or the calendar.
