Would you uproot your existence and move to a different country for $1,000? That’s the gamble the Trump administration is hoping millions of undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers make in the latest development of its mass deportation agenda.
On Monday, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced that undocumented immigrants who used the Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) Home app to prove they’d left the United States and returned to their home countries would receive $1,000. The announcement came with several other promises, including that undocumented immigrants who indicated on the CBP Home app that they were planning to self-deport would be “deprioritized” from removal actions by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and that immigrants who self-deported “may” be able to re-enter the country legally in the future.
Fake news? Like many of the claims coming from Trump and his administration, this “deal” should be approached with skepticism. The American Immigration Lawyers Association called the proposal a “deeply misleading and unethical trick” because it “gives people the impression there are no consequences, such as being barred from returning in the future.”
Taking up the offer may lead to worse consequences in the immigration system. For immigrants who are in removal proceedings and have a scheduled day in court, missing a court appearance because they’ve self-deported could lead to an automatic deportation order anyway, barring them from entering again. For those who have applied for asylum or other forms of immigration relief, leaving the country would likely count as abandoning their asylum claims, in which case they’d need to restart the process in the future.
There’s no guarantee that anybody who leaves the country will actually get $1,000. Immigrants have to have already left the country to even apply for the funds. Nothing in the announcement suggests that the federal government would be legally bound to pay up.
By submitting information through the CBP app, undocumented immigrants may be providing the government with information that will make it easier to deport them or their relatives, and to prevent them from returning to the country in the future.
At the heart of this announcement is the effort to make carrying out mass deportations cheaper. DHS estimates it costs over $17,000 to deport one person, and the Trump administration is pushing Congress to appropriate more funding for ICE. Conservative estimates by the American Immigration Council tally the cost of carrying out mass deportations in the tens of billions of dollars every year.
Ultimately, Trump is hoping he can convince immigrants—and citizens—to comply with his agenda by self-deporting, cooperating with ICE, and accepting unconstitutional attacks on immigration law and due process.