A bipartisan duo is pushing back on President Donald Trump’s attempts to end a program that lets hundreds of thousands of foreign students work in the US for a year after graduation. Reps. Sam Liccardo (D-CA) and Jay Obernolte (R-CA) introduced a bill that would codify Optional Practical Training (OPT), which allows international students to work in their field of study for 12 months, with extensions of up to 24 months for STEM students.
Trump is threatening international students, and a new bill could help stop him
A program with bipartisan support is at risk under the president’s immigration crackdown.
A program with bipartisan support is at risk under the president’s immigration crackdown.
OPT was introduced in 1992 and functions as a sort of bridge between student visas, or F-1s, and H-1Bs, the visa category issued to foreign nationals who work for US companies. But OPT is now under threat from the Trump administration, which has floated the possibility of doing away with it altogether as part of its broader crackdown on legal immigration. Liccardo and Obernolte are hoping to shore up bipartisan support for the program, which until recently went under the radar and faced little opposition from either party.
Between 2006 and 2022, 56 percent of the international students who entered the country on F-1 visas enrolled in OPT, according to data from the Institute for Progress. Students with postgraduate degrees are more likely to enroll in OPT than those with bachelor’s degrees, and those in STEM fields are more likely to use the program to find work in the US than those in other fields. The Department of Homeland Security’s statistics show that 165,524 foreign students participated in STEM OPT in 2024 alone. STEM PhDs have the highest rate of participation in OPT, with 76 percent of graduates enrolling in the program.
“The OPT program enables hundreds of thousands of the best and the brightest from around the world to be educated in the United States, and to have a pathway to contribute to our economy,” Liccardo, the bill’s cosponsor, told The Verge. “The alternative to OPT is to educate these brilliant people and to then send them back to their countries of origin, where they’ll start companies to compete against us.”
Congress hasn’t passed any meaningful immigration reform in decades, and OPT wasn’t created by legislation at all. President George H.W. Bush established the program in 1992 under the authority of the Department of Justice, which oversaw the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the precursor to ICE, until DHS began operations in 2003. The OPT program is now administered by US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the agency within DHS that deals with legal immigration.
When new regulations have been issued regarding OPT, they’ve always expanded the program rather than reduced its scope: Both George W. Bush and Barack Obama increased the OPT period for students with STEM degrees, who can now work in the US for up to 36 months.
“It’s never had a life in statute,” Liccardo said, “which is precisely why in this environment, in which every two hours there’s a new idea about how this administration can cut the United States off from the world — whether that’s choking off talent, or exports, or relationships with our allies — we want to codify it to make sure that this valuable program continues to help us drive the American economy.”
Though OPT has broad bipartisan support, the program has faced legal challenges for over a decade. The Washington Alliance of Technology Workers sued DHS in 2014 after the Obama administration extended STEM OPT to 17 months, arguing the change hurt American workers. The suit also claimed that DHS exceeded its regulatory authority when creating OPT. In an amicus brief filed in 2019, more than 100 colleges said that ending OPT would make it harder for them to “compete for international students, particularly at a time when global competition is fierce and international students are already questioning whether they are welcome in the United States in light of recent changes in immigration policy and enforcement.”
During his May 2025 nomination hearing, Joseph B. Edlow, Trump’s pick for the head of USCIS, promised to end OPT. Edlow, who was confirmed by the Senate, said OPT has been “mishandled,” adding that he favored a “regulatory and sub-regulatory program that would allow us to remove” employment authorizations for international students after they leave school. Several groups that favor immigration restriction, including the right-wing Center for Immigration Studies, have long sought an end to OPT, which they say brings down wages for American workers.
There were some reports last fall that the Trump administration could issue a rule to that effect early in 2026, but no changes have been made to OPT yet. Still, in addition to conducting large-scale ICE raids across the country, the Trump administration is pushing to restrict many forms of legal migration. It raised the fee for H-1B visas to $100,000 and imposed full or partial travel bans on nationals of 20 countries. Though Trump has previously said that he would like to give green cards to every single international student who graduates from a US university, it’s far more likely that his administration will move to limit OPT or get rid of it altogether.
Liccardo, who cosponsored the bill that would codify OPT, said eliminating the program will have downstream effects that hurt all Americans. “At a moment when China in particular is outcompeting the United States across many technologies and industries ranging from solar and energy storage to, increasingly now, biotech,” he said, “we cannot afford to lose American-trained, American-educated engineers, scientists, and innovators to fuel our competitors’ economies.”