WASHINGTON — In line with its plan to deport a lot of people, President Donald Trump’s government said on Monday that it would pay $1,000 to immigrants who are in the US illegally and choose to go back to their home country.
In a news release, the Department of Homeland Security said it would also pay for travel help. It also said that people who use the app CBP Home to tell the government they want to go home will be “deprioritized” for detention and removal by immigration officials.
There is no better, safer, or cheaper way to leave the United States without getting caught than to self-deport, according to Secretary Kristi Noem. “Through the CBP Home App, DHS is now giving illegal immigrants money to help pay for their travel and a stipend to go back to their home country.”
At least one migrant’s plane ticket back to Honduras from Chicago had already been paid for by the department. More tickets have been booked for this week and next.
It’s an important part of Trump’s government.
Trump made strict immigration laws and deporting large groups of people here illegally a big part of his campaign, and he is keeping his word in the first few months of his presidency. But it is an expensive and resource-intensive project.
The Republican government wants Congress to give Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) a lot more money to remove people from the country. At the same time, it is encouraging people who are in the country illegally to “self-deport.”
Along with this push for self-deportation, it has run TV ads threatening action against people in the U.S. illegally and posted pictures on social media of immigration officers arresting migrants and sending them to a jail in El Salvador.
Self-deportation has been painted by the Trump administration as a way for migrants to keep their ability to come back to the US someday. On Monday, the president himself brought it up in a conversation with reporters at the White House. He said that foreigners who leave the U.S. on their own might be able to legally come back “if they’re good people and love our country.”
Trump said, “And if they aren’t, they won’t.”
But senior fellow Aaron Reichlen-Melnick of the American Immigration Council, a group that helps immigrants, said that the new offer from Homeland Security has a lot of things that migrants should be careful about.
If someone is already being removed from the country, he said it’s often worse for them to leave and not fight their case in immigration court. He said that refugees can get deported right away if they don’t show up to court when they are supposed to, and that leaving the country usually means giving up on many applications for help, including asylum applications.
Getting it done can be hard.
That’s not to say that Homeland Security works closely with the immigration courts to make sure that people in immigration court don’t face any problems if they leave, he said.
He said, “People’s immigration status is not as simple as this makes it out to be.”
He asked where Homeland Security would get the money and the permission to make the payments. He also said that they were needed because the government can’t arrest and deport as many people as it has promised, so it has to get people to do it on their own.
He said, “They’re not getting their numbers.”
As part of its push for self-deportation, the Trump administration has turned an app that the Biden administration used to help almost a million migrants make appointments to come to the U.S. into a tool to help migrants go back home. It was called CBP One when Biden was in office; now it’s called CBP Home.
Homeland Security said that “thousands” of migrants have used the app to voluntarily leave the country.
Mark Krikorian, who runs the Centre for Immigration Studies and wants fewer immigrants, said that the offer to pay people to go home doesn’t mean that the Trump administration is admitting that some parts of their plan to police immigration laws aren’t working.
He said that because there are so many people in the country illegally, it would be impossible to deport them all. This is why the government has to work to enforce the law while also trying to get people to leave on their own.
Krikorian said he likes the idea of paying migrants to leave, but he wasn’t sure how it would work in practice.
“How do you know for sure that they’ve gone home?” His question was, “Do you make them sign a document saying they won’t fight their removal if they come back?” “How it’s done matters, but the idea is good.”