Biden's ICE received 3,145,375 tips about foreigners who overstayed their visas from 2021 through 2024 and made eight arrests from them, according to a new DHS Inspector General audit. Read the report's own tables and the collapse has a date on it: viable leads fell 98 percent in the first year after Alejandro Mayorkas signed his September 2021 enforcement-priorities memo, and two of the handful of "public safety threats" ICE did chase are still fugitives today.

Three Million Tips, Eight Arrests

The audit, OIG-26-38, is dated September 29, and DHS publicized it Monday. It covers fiscal years 2021 through 2024. Over those four years, Customs and Border Protection sent ICE daily lists of people who came in legally on tourist, business, student or work visas and never left on time.

ICE flagged 104,049 of those leads as potential national security or public safety concerns. It judged 21,885 of them viable for investigation. It opened 496 investigations, about 2 percent of the viable pile, and arrested eight people. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin called it a "dereliction of duty, which needlessly put American lives at risk," in a DHS statement Monday, adding that it was "staggering and enraging."

The Collapse Started the Day Mayorkas Signed the Memo

Most coverage stopped at the headline numbers. The more telling figure is in Table 3, on page 6 of the report. In fiscal 2021, ICE counted 20,648 overstay leads as viable for investigation. In fiscal 2022, that number was 415. It was 615 in 2023 and 207 in 2024.

The Inspector General names the cause in plain words. Viable leads "declined precipitously after FY 2021," the report says, "because the Civil Enforcement Priorities Memo instructed ICE to focus on Priority 1 leads." Mayorkas signed that memo on September 30, 2021, the final day of fiscal 2021. Before it, ICE treated Priority 1 through 9 leads as fair game. After it, field offices got mainly Priority 1 cases, the ones tied to suspected terrorism or serious crime.

The memo told ICE to go after foreigners only if they threatened national security, public safety, or border security, and the border category covered people caught crossing illegally or who had entered illegally after November 1, 2020. A tourist who flew in legally and simply never went home fit none of those boxes unless something else turned up. President Trump rescinded the memo on his first day back, January 20, 2025.

Even the Top Threats Mostly Went Untouched

Narrowing the focus to the worst cases did not produce results on the worst cases. Across the four years, ICE's Homeland Security Investigations unit rated 1,769 overstay leads as Priority 1. Under ICE's own scale, that category can include a known or suspected terrorist on a watchlist from a country that harbors terrorists. HSI opened 84 investigations on them, just under 5 percent, and made two arrests.

Table 5 breaks it down by year. In fiscal 2021 there were 545 Priority 1 leads and zero arrests. In fiscal 2022 there were 409 and zero arrests. One arrest followed in 2023 and one in 2024.

Addresses were a big part of the problem. At the end of fiscal 2024, HSI could not refer 194 of its 205 Priority 1 targets for action, in part because it lacked usable address information. ICE officials told auditors that the addresses CBP collects at the airport are often temporary spots "such as hotels or resorts."

Two "Public Safety Threats" Are Still on the Loose

The other 2,837,188 leads, rated Non-Priority, went to ICE's Enforcement and Removal Operations. ERO found five of them that met the Mayorkas memo's bar as public safety threats and investigated all five. The report describes each case, and the details are worth reading.

One was a Jamaican national who came in on a business and tourist visa in June 2021, overstayed, and pleaded guilty to criminal possession of a loaded firearm, a class C felony. Another was a Chilean national who entered under the Visa Waiver Program in July 2021 and was convicted three separate times, for felony credit card fraud, criminal impersonation, and felony burglary. Both served their time or were under supervision. As of June 2026, ICE "cannot locate" either one, and both are listed as fugitives.

A third, from the Dominican Republic, overstayed a tourist visa and was convicted of retail theft in January 2023. ERO learned in August 2025 that the person had since become a lawful permanent resident.

Is the Headline Number Fair?

Mostly, and the report itself gives the context readers deserve. The eight arrests count only cases that started from an overstay lead in the same period. HSI also arrested 263 overstays from leads opened in earlier years and 183 more who turned up in unrelated cases, such as a gang investigation that swept up an associate. ERO arrested 16,458 people during worksite raids and other operations who were later identified as overstays.

That is still a thin harvest from more than three million tips, and none of it changes the core finding. The system built to find dangerous overstays on purpose barely ran for three years. The 104,049 figure DHS cited also includes Priority 2 through 9 leads, the lower-risk end of the flagged group, so "100,000 national security threats" is a ceiling, not a count of confirmed terrorists.

ICE Agreed, Then Complained About the Timing

The report makes one recommendation: that ICE build a plan to investigate and arrest more Priority 1 overstays. ICE concurred in an August 26 response signed by Mary Beth Baden, its acting chief financial officer. But the agency also argued that "the utility of this audit is affected by the timing and scope," since it covered "a period that predominantly occurred under the prior administration." ICE says it is now following Trump's Executive Order 14161, which directs DHS to prioritize overstays for removal.

The Inspector General's office answered that the audit started in August 2024 and that its publication was "significantly delayed by three Government shutdowns in FY 2026, which covered 56 percent of the fiscal year through May 1, 2026." ICE's estimated completion date for its new plan is September 30, 2027. That is a full year away, on a problem the government has now documented in writing.

Why Overstays Matter More Than Most People Think

Border crossings get the cameras. Overstays come in through the front door with a stamped passport. The report notes that the State Department issued more than 31 million nonimmigrant visas in fiscal 2021 through 2024, and cites an earlier Inspector General finding that more than 12 million visas were issued between March 2020 and March 2024 without an in-person interview or fingerprints.

That combination is the real story here. Millions of lightly screened visitors arrived, hundreds of thousands stayed past their deadline each year, and a policy memo told the agency that tracks them to stand down on nearly all of it. We have reported on how the Trump administration is tightening the front end, including its push to end open-ended student visas.

Congress has already paid for the fix. The report notes that Public Law 119-21, passed in July 2025, gave DHS almost $30 billion to boost ICE operations, including overstay enforcement. The Inspector General just handed ICE the target list. The question now is whether a plan due in late 2027 is fast enough to catch the fugitives the last administration let walk.