Trump administration offers unauthorized immigrants $1,000 to leave the country

The Trump administration announced a plan Monday to try to ramp up the number of deportations: paying unauthorized immigrants $1,000 if they return to their home country voluntarily.

The Department of Homeland Security called the plan a “historic opportunity for illegal aliens,” noting in a news release that it would also pay for travel assistance.

Any immigrant who used the Customs and Border Protection Home App to inform the government that they plan to return home, the department said, would receive a $1,000 payment after the government had confirmed their return.

“If you are here illegally, self-deportation is the best, safest and most cost-effective way to leave the United States to avoid arrest,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a statement. “This is the safest option for our law enforcement, aliens and is a 70% savings for US taxpayers.”

President Trump has made mass deportations — a key platform of his 2024 election campaign — a priority in his first three months in office. But so far, the actual number of immigrants deported under his Republican administration has slightly lagged the number deported under his predecessor, Democratic President Biden, as fewer immigrants are now attempting to cross the U.S. border.

Hiroshi Motomura, a law professor at UCLA who specializes in American immigration and citizenship, said the U.S. is not the first nation to try to persuade immigrants to leave the country. Over the years, other countries, such as Germany and Japan, have offered financial incentives for immigrants to self-deport.

“Some of the calculus is what you’re seeing now, which is it’s much cheaper to pay people to leave than it is to forcibly deport them,” Motomura said.

Clearly, the Trump administration is looking for ways to up the number of deportations to match its campaign rhetoric, Motomura said. But he urged any immigrant considering whether to self-deport to consult with an attorney.

Many immigrants have a potential legal pathway to stay — if they are married to a U.S. citizen or have a job offer or a claim of persecution in their home country — but may not have access to an attorney or the legal help to negotiate that pathway, Motomura said.

“Self-deportation certainly is one way to get people to leave the country,” he said. “But the dilemma here, or the policy problem, is that they’re going to get people to leave the country who actually have a right to stay. … They’re asking people to make decisions in a vacuum of knowing what their rights are.”

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The Trump administration is promoting its incentives to immigrants who are in the country illegally to leave on their own as a “dignified way to leave the U.S.” — one that it says will have them deprioritized for detention or being picked up by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents if they demonstrate they’re making plans to depart.

Homeland Security also provoked controversy in legal circles by promoting its offer as a way for unauthorized immigrants to legally return to the U.S.: Self-deporting, the news release states, “may help preserve the option ... to re-enter the United States legally in the future.”

Some immigration experts warned that this offered false promise.

“It is an incredibly cruel bit of deception for DHS to be telling people that if they leave they ‘will maintain the ability to return to the U.S. legally in the future,’ Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, said on the social media platform X.

“Despite DHS’s claims, leaving the country could impose SEVERE consequences for many people here currently without status, with a 10-year bar on reentry being a best-case scenario for most,” he added.

In an interview with Fox News on Monday, Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said immigrants who took advantage of the deal could “potentially come back the legal, right way and come back to live the American dream.”

“This might put you in a better position,” she added, “because there’s documentation that you have decided to self deport.”

Asked why immigrants should trust the Trump administration’s offer, McLaughlin said: “We’re giving you our word that we will give you this money and that you can leave today. It’s the safest way. You will not be arrested, you will not be detained, and we will give you that free flight.”

Motomura said the idea that immigrants who self-deport would have a better chance of returning to live in the U.S. legally stemmed from the fact that there are some negative consequences to a formal order of removal: “It limits when you can come back,” he said, “and it may limit your ability to access other immigration related benefits.”

But ultimately, Motomura said, any benefit of self-deportation would depend on the individual: an immigrant who left the U.S. after being in the country without status for 180 days could not come back for three years, he noted, and an immigrant who left the U.S. after being in the country for a year could not come back for 10 years.

He added that while an immigrant who was in the country without status for a shorter period of time, such as two weeks for example, could be better off leaving on their own rather than being subject to a formal deportation order, such situations were less typical.

The Trump administration is also pitching its plan as a deal for American taxpayers.

“Even with the cost of the stipend, it is projected that the use of CBP Home will decrease the costs of a deportation by around 70 percent,” the Department of Homeland Security said in its release, noting that it costs more than $17,000, on average, to arrest, detain and remove an unauthorized immigrant.

Homeland Security said that an immigrant in the U.S. illegally recently used the program to receive a ticket for a flight from Chicago to Honduras, and that additional plane tickets have been booked for the next few weeks.