Why are Edlow and Vaughan calling OPT illegal? Here's the real story

In the quietly panicked corridors of international education policy, a storm is gathering around the United States’ Optional Practical Training ( OPT ) program—and for once, it’s not hyperbole to say that the damage may already be done. The numbers are stark, the policy narrative even starker. According to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) SEVIS 2024 report, over 194,554 international students received work authorisation under OPT last year. Of these, a staggering 95,384 secured extensions under the STEM OPT provision. And standing at the centre of this tectonic shift are Indian students, who account for nearly 98,000 of those OPT authorisations during the 2023–24 cycle, as confirmed by the Indian Ministry of External Affairs.

But now, the very scaffolding of this bridge—from academic promise to professional foothold—is under coordinated assault by voices both influential and ideological. Leading the charge are Jessica Vaughan , Director of Policy Studies at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), and Joseph Edlow , the newly confirmed Director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services ( USCIS ). Both have testified before Congress in 2025 that OPT is not only legally suspect but structurally dangerous.

The rhetoric may be wrapped in legalese, but the intent is clear: Dismantle the post-study work rights that have long made U.S. degrees a prized aspiration for international—and particularly Indian—students. What’s at stake is more than immigration. It is the erasure of a pipeline that has quietly underwritten America’s dominance in global tech and innovation.

Edlow and Vaughan ’s case against OPT: Congress didn't sign it, so let's burn itAt the core of the campaign to dismantle the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program lies a foundational dispute—not merely about visas or foreign labour, but about who gets to define the boundaries of lawful work in postsecondary America. And in this ideological contest, Jessica Vaughan and Joseph Edlow have emerged as the architects of what they frame as a long-overdue correction.
Their argument is deceptively simple: OPT is not law—it is regulation. Worse, they claim, it is unregulated regulation, sustained not by statute but by administrative inertia and legal loopholes.

In her detailed testimony before the House Judiciary Subcommittee in June 2025, Vaughan—Director of Policy Studies at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS)—delivered a withering critique of what she called “the largest unregulated guest worker scheme in the United States.” Drawing from internal data sets provided by ICE and the Department of Homeland Security, Vaughan revealed that over 540,000 work authorisations were granted under OPT and CPT (Curricular Practical Training) in FY2023 alone.

This, she argued, was not just administrative generosity—it was regulatory anarchy.

In her words, OPT had "spawned an industry of diploma mills, fake schools, bogus training programs, and illegal employment." According to her testimony, the Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP)—the body meant to oversee the legitimacy of these academic affiliations—was too chronically under-resourced to vet the scale of demand. The result, she concluded, was a parallel ecosystem of academic storefronts and training programmes designed not for learning, but for visa preservation and labour substitution.

But perhaps her sharpest critique was constitutional in tone. OPT, she reminded the Committee, is not authorised by the US Congress. It was created as an extension of executive rulemaking, first formalised under the Bush administration and later expanded under Obama. “There has never been a vote in Congress,” Vaughan noted, “to allow hundreds of thousands of foreign graduates to work on US soil under this program.”

Edlow, a former Trump-era official brought back to restore “legal fidelity” to immigration enforcement, seconded the legalistic rebuke. In multiple briefings before the Senate and in internal USCIS memoranda from April–June 2025, Edlow contended that the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) makes no provision for post-completion work for F-1 visa holders. "The INA is unambiguous," he said. "Student visas are for study—not for work after graduation."

He took particular aim at the 2023 D.C. Circuit Court ruling, which upheld the legality of OPT and its STEM extension. The decision, Edlow claimed, rested on an “erroneous reading of statutory intent”—one that unjustifiably enlarged the executive branch's power to define immigration eligibility criteria without congressional consent.

In his congressional appearances and in internal DHS documents, Edlow has further proposed reorienting USCIS enforcement priorities. Specifically, he has called for an expanded role for the Fraud Detection and National Security (FDNS) directorate in vetting OPT applicants and employers—a move that signals a coming compliance-heavy era, where student employment records could be re-audited, revoked, or flagged for deportation if found wanting.

Both Vaughan and Edlow converge on the same policy prescription, stated either in soft legalism or hard numbers: The OPT program must either be terminated outright or restricted so severely that it becomes operationally nonviable for most international graduates. In other words, OPT must be stripped of its current utility to ensure it cannot continue under the guise of administrative legitimacy.

What really lies beneath Edlow and Vaughan’s constitutional and legal arguments?Behind Edlow and Vaughan’s polished legal rhetoric lies a deeper mission—one that has less to do with statutes and more to do with reshaping America’s relationship with global talent. Woven beneath the testimony is a broader, more ideological belief that international student mobility has been hijacked by corporate interests, and that foreign graduates are now indistinguishable from guest workers, hired to circumvent wage floors, sidestep payroll taxes, and bypass labour market tests that would otherwise favour American graduates.

To this end, Vaughan and Edlow’s critique is not merely of OPT as policy, but of OPT as economic architecture—an invisible scaffold that supports tech giants, universities, and global talent mobility. For them, removing that scaffold is not disruption. It is restoration.

Come, pay, tuition and leaveWhat Edlow and Vaughan propose is more than a policy fix—it is a structural decoupling of education from employability, one that threatens to return the F-1 visa to a narrow, transactional instrument: come, pay tuition, and leave.

It is this return to pre-globalisation thinking that most alarms educators and economists alike. And it is this version of “legal clarity” that could leave hundreds of thousands of students—including the 98,000 Indian graduates currently working under OPT—on the edge of a bureaucratic cliff, with no safety net beyond the 90-day unemployment cap.

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