A DHS Watchdog Report Just Revealed How Few Overstay Suspects Biden’s Team Ever Arrested

ICE already knew the names of visa overstayers accused of stabbings and sexual assault.

A new Homeland Security inspector general report just put a number on how many of those cases ICE actually investigated.

Out of millions of flagged leads, the number of overstay suspects ICE actually arrested will stop you cold.

DHS Flagged 104,000 Leads as Possible Threats and Investigated Almost None of Them

The Department of Homeland Security's inspector general dug through ICE's visa overstay files from 2021 through 2024 for this report.

ICE received 3.1 million visa overstay leads during that stretch under Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

Roughly 104,000 of those leads were flagged as potential national security or public safety threats.

ICE opened just 496 investigations out of that entire pool.

That is roughly two investigations for every one hundred dangerous leads sitting in the system.

Among the 1,769 leads marked Priority 1, the highest threat tier the agency tracks, ICE investigated only 84.

ICE flagged 2,837,188 leads as non-priority and still only chased down five of them as possible public safety threats.

The Eight Arrests That Prove How Broken Mayorkas Left the System

Eight arrests.

That is the total number of people ICE took into custody out of the entire 3.1 million-lead backlog the inspector general reviewed.

Two of those arrests came from the 1,769 highest-priority leads the agency itself flagged as urgent.

RedState's review of the report ties the enforcement gap directly to violent crimes committed by overstayers who were already sitting in the ICE database before they struck.

The inspector general's report documents stabbings, animal cruelty, and sexual assault cases tied to people the agency had already identified and chose not to chase down.

Mayorkas ran the department that generated these numbers and never flagged the backlog as a crisis publicly before leaving office.

This is not the first time Mayorkas' department sat on overstay numbers instead of answering for them.

Senators Josh Hawley and James Lankford accused DHS of illegally withholding an earlier overstay report back in December 2021, telling Mayorkas directly that "your continued delay in providing these reports violates the law."

That report documented nearly 585,000 suspected overstays and, according to the senators, got buried while Congress debated an amnesty package.

Four years later, the inspector general's new numbers show the stonewalling was not a one-time lapse.

It was the operating pattern.

The Backlog Tom Homan Now Has to Dig Out Of

A watchdog report does not fix four years of buried leads.

It puts a number on exactly how badly Mayorkas' department failed and hands the next administration a paper trail instead of excuses.

Border czar Tom Homan has hammered this exact kind of backlog in briefing after briefing, and now the inspector general has handed him the receipts.

The next time a Democrat claims the border crisis was a myth, this report is the rebuttal.

A visa overstay is not a paperwork violation.

It is a federal law broken by someone the government already let into the country on the promise they would leave on time.

Every name on that 104,000-lead list is someone who made that promise and broke it, and ICE still could not be bothered to knock on the door.

Three million overstay leads and eight arrests is not an enforcement gap.

It is an enforcement system that stopped functioning and nobody at the top was willing to say so out loud.

This report came from the DHS inspector general, not a campaign ad, and the numbers inside it are worse than anything Fox News ever accused Mayorkas of hiding.

Sources:

• Bob Hoge, "Dereliction of Duty: Blistering DHS OIG Report Reveals Biden Asleep at the Wheel on Visa Overstays," RedState, October 6, 2026.
• U.S. Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General, "Review of ICE Visa Overstay Lead Investigations," Department of Homeland Security, 2026.
• Senator Josh Hawley and Senator James Lankford, "Hawley, Lankford Demand DHS Stop Hiding Required Report on Visa Overstays," Office of Senator Josh Hawley, December 21, 2021.