In July 2022, a Honduran national entered the United States on a tourist visa. By August, he'd been charged with rape and assault in Maryland. It took Homeland Security Investigations until September 2023 — over a year later — to arrest him on his immigration overstay. He was one of eight.
Eight people. Out of 3.1 million leads.
The Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General dropped Report OIG-26-38 on September 29, and the numbers are so absurd they read like a typo. Between fiscal years 2021 and 2024, ICE received exactly 3,145,375 nonimmigrant visa-overstay leads. Of those, 104,049 were flagged as potential national-security or public-safety concerns. Homeland Security Investigations winnowed those down to 21,885 viable leads deemed appropriate for investigation. They opened 496 investigations.
They arrested eight people.
That's a conversion rate so low it doesn't exist in any functioning law-enforcement operation on Earth. One arrest per 387,500 leads. Calling that enforcement stretches the word beyond recognition.
The highest-risk category tells the story even more clearly. ICE designated 1,769 leads as "Priority 1" — the classification reserved for individuals posing the most serious national-security and public-safety threats. These are the leads that, in any rational system, get worked first. HSI opened 84 investigations from those Priority 1 leads. They made two arrests.
Two. Out of the most dangerous category ICE tracks.
The OIG report explains part of the mechanism. Of 205 Priority 1 leads in one reviewed batch, HSI couldn't even refer 194 of them because the address data on file was insufficient — hotels, resorts, temporary accommodations that foreign nationals listed on entry and never updated. The system wasn't built to find people. It was built to lose them.
The collapse wasn't gradual. In fiscal year 2021, ICE had 20,648 viable leads to work. By FY 2022, that number had cratered to 415. FY 2023: 615. FY 2024: 207. The pipeline didn't dry up because fewer people overstayed their visas. It dried up because former Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas issued a September 2021 policy restricting which leads ICE would pursue. The leads kept coming in — 3.1 million of them. The willingness to act on them evaporated.
The Mayorkas memo didn't say "stop enforcing visa overstays." Memos like that never say what they mean. It restructured enforcement priorities in a way that made the practical outcome indistinguishable from a stand-down order. When your viable lead count drops 98% in a single year while your incoming lead volume stays in the millions, that's not prioritization. That's policy.
As of the OIG's review, two non-priority overstays from previous years were still listed as fugitives as recently as June 2026. ICE's own corrective action plan has a target completion date of September 30, 2027 — meaning the agency's timeline for fixing a system that produced eight arrests from 3.1 million leads stretches into the next decade.
President Trump canceled the Biden-era enforcement memo on his first day back in office. The State Department expanded visa screening procedures starting October 1. Whether the new posture produces different numbers is a question the next OIG report will answer.
But the old numbers already answered the only question that mattered. ICE had 3,145,375 chances to enforce the law. It used eight of them.