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The Trump administration has announced a new program offering a $1,000 payment to people in the US without immigration status as an incentive to return to their home country voluntarily.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) outlined the initiative on Monday, pledging “financial and travel assistance” to undocumented immigrants who agree to leave the country using an app called CBP Home.
That is a version of the app devised in the Biden administration called CBPOne that gave people approaching the US-Mexico border without official arrangements a strictly limited channel to request asylum in the US and enter legally when issued an appointment. Donald Trump shut that down upon inauguration, as vowed, stranding many, and later changed its name and function so that CBP Home is a tool to exit the US, not enter.
The agency claimed that the $1,000 payment would be issued only after the individual has returned to their home country and it has been confirmed through the app. DHS made the announcement in a news release emphasizing many of the terms, some legally questionable, favored by the administration in its hardline anti-immigration policy, such as “illegal alien” and “self-deport”.
“If you are here illegally, self-deportation is the best, safest and most cost-effective way to leave the United States to avoid arrest,” said Kristi Noem, the DHS secretary.
In the news release, DHS stated that one individual had already participated in the program, receiving a plane ticket for a flight from Chicago to Honduras, and “additional tickets have already been booked for this week and the following week”.
The department estimates that even with the cost of the stipend, the program “will decrease the costs of a deportation by around 70%”.
Currently, the DHS claims, the average cost to arrest, detain and deport someone from the US is $17,121.
The agency also stated in the announcement that individuals who use the CBP Home app to declare their intent to leave the US will be “deprioritized for detention and removal ahead of their departure as long as they demonstrate they are making meaningful strides in completing that departure”.
The DHS further claimed that participation in the program “may help preserve the option” for an individual to re-enter the US “legally in the future”.
But critics sounded the alarm.
“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 US legally in the future’,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, in a social media post. “Many people who might see this as an option would be put in a WORSE OFF legal position. So this is a TRAP.”
The new initiative, centered on the Trump administration’s concept of “self-deportation” – which is the notion that conditions in the US can be made so unbearable for undocumented immigrants that they will choose to leave – is their latest action to crack down on immigration.
