We determine the irreducible components of Igusa varieties for Shimura varieties of Hodge type and use that to determine the irreducible components of central leaves. In particular, we show that the discrete Hecke-orbit conjecture is false in general
. Our method combines recent work of DAddezio on monodromy of compatible local systems with a generalisation of a method of Hida, using the Honda-Tate theory for Shimura varieties of Hodge type developed by Kisin-Madapusi Pera-Shin. We also determine the irreducible components of Newton strata in Shimura varieties of Hodge type by combining our results with recent work of Zhou-Zhu.
The Hecke orbit conjecture asserts that every prime-to-$p$ Hecke orbit in a Shimura variety is dense in the central leaf containing it. In this paper, we prove the conjecture for certain irreducible components of Newton strata in Shimura varieties of
PEL type A and C, when $p$ is an unramified prime of good reduction. Our approach generalizes Chai and Oorts method for Siegel modular varieties.
