Trump administration says it’ll pay immigrants in the US illegally $1,000 to leave the country

By REBECCA SANTANA, Associated Press

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s administration said Monday that it is going to pay immigrants who are in the United States illegally and return to their home country voluntarily $1,000 as it pushes forward with its mass deportation agenda.

The Department of Homeland Security said in a news release that it’s also paying for travel assistance and that those people who use an app called CBP Home to tell the government that they plan to return home will be “deprioritized” for detention and removal by immigration enforcement.

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“If you are here illegally, self-deportation is the best, safest and most cost-effective way to leave the United States to avoid arrest,” Secretary Kristi Noem said. “DHS is now offering illegal aliens financial travel assistance and a stipend to return to their home country through the CBP Home App.”

The department said it had already paid for a plane ticket for one migrant to return home to Honduras from Chicago and said more tickets have been booked for this week and next.

Trump has made immigration enforcement and the mass deportation of immigrants in the U.S. illegally a centerpiece of his campaign, but that is a costly, resource-intensive endeavor.

While the Republican administration is pushing Congress for a massive increase in resources for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement department responsible for removing people from the country, it’s also pushing people in the country illegally to “self-deport.”

It has coupled this self-deportation push with television ads threatening action against people in the U.S. illegally and social media images showing immigration enforcement arrests and migrants being sent to a prison in El Salvador.

The Trump administration has often portrayed self-deportation as a way for the migrants to preserve their ability to return to the U.S. someday.

But Aaron Reichlen-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, which advocates for immigrants, said there’s a lot for migrants to be cautious about in this latest offer from Homeland Security.

He said it’s often worse for people to leave the country and not fight their case in immigration court, especially if they’re already in removal proceedings. He said if migrants are in removal proceedings and don’t show up in court they can automatically get a deportation order and leaving the country usually counts as abandoning many applications for relief including asylum applications.

And Homeland Security is not indicating that it is closely coordinating this push to get migrants to self-deport with the immigration courts so that there are no repercussions for people in immigration court if they leave, he said.

“People’s immigration status is not as simple as this makes it out to be,” Reichlen-Melnick said.

He questioned where Homeland Security would get the money and the authorization to make these payments and suggested the payments are necessary because the administration is not able to arrest and remove as many people as it has promised so it has to encourage people to do it on their own.

“They’re not getting their numbers,” he said.

As part of it’s self-deportation effort, the Trump administration has transformed an app that had been used by the Biden administration to allow nearly 1 million migrants to schedule appointments to enter the country into a tool to help migrants return home. Under the Biden administration it was called CBP One, and now it’s dubbed CBP Home.

Homeland Security said so far “thousands” of migrants have used the app to self-deport.