DHS to Pay Illegal Aliens to Leave

On May 5, DHS announced it would be offering “Historic Travel Assistance” and a “Stipend for Voluntary Self-Deportation” — that is, a plan to pay removable aliens who use the CBP Home app to leave. While it may be controversial, it could also be a cost- and resource-effective way to drive down the unauthorized population — assuming enough people take the department up on its offer.

The Costs of Removal

Deporting illegal aliens can be a costly and extremely time-consuming business.

First, immigration officers must investigate and locate those aliens, then physically take them into custody, and after that, generally detain them (average cost: about $150 per bed per day).

Then, there are the costs of prosecuting those aliens in immigration court.

In addition to paying immigration judges’ salaries (up to $195,000 per year) and benefits, taxpayers are also on the hook for court clerks, interpreters (average salary: $78,000-plus per year), courtroom and chambers space, and the ICE attorneys (average salary: $89,000 per year) who represent the interests of the American people, plus bailiffs and security.

Technically, aliens ordered removed are supposed to be detained (again, at a cost of roughly $150 per day) for up to 90 days pending deportation, but in practice that rarely happens except when the alien was detained already. Regardless, ICE must apply for travel documents for those aliens, make any needed arrangements for returns, and buy outbound tickets for the aliens it deports.

Detained aliens can’t avoid showing up for court, but 34 percent (on average) of non-detained aliens never appear and are ordered removed in absentia. And of course, plenty of aliens appear for every court date, but then don’t appear for removal. That means all of those costs I just described are, in essence, for naught, unless ICE also spends more money and resources to find the absconders.

Assuming it ever does find those aliens. At the end of November, 1,445,549 aliens on ICE’s non-detained docket were under final orders of removal. They’ve received their “due process” — they just haven’t been removed, and if they are located, don’t be surprised when a lot of them file motions to reopen in order to prolong their illicit stays here even longer.

Add it all up, and according to ICE the average current cost to arrest, detain, and remove an illegal alien adds up to $17,121.

“CBP One” Becomes “CBP Home”

That’s about the average cost of a new Kia Soul or Nissan Versa, and while most American voters favor deporting aliens here illegally, both the current White House and the Republicans running Congress are cost-conscious, too.

For that reason, at the same time Border Czar Tom Homan is focusing on the removal of criminal aliens illegally present in the United States, the Trump administration has been implementing some inventive ways to encourage the rest of them to leave voluntarily.

That’s a marked shift from the last administration, which regularly rolled out new plans to allow even more illegal aliens to come to the United States.

One of those Biden innovations was a policy I have referred to as the “CBP One app interview scheme”. Here’s how it worked.

In January 2023, the White House announced it had modified an online mobile application — the “CBP One” cell phone app — which was originally created to facilitate lawful admissions to instead allow inadmissible aliens (with no visas and no right to enter) to schedule “interview” appointments at Southwest border ports of entry.

In short order, 1,400 interview slots were available for CBP One users per day, and by the end of December, more than 936,500 would-be illegal migrants had scheduled port interviews using the app.

While not much is known about what occurred during those interviews, congressional disclosures revealed that 95.8 percent of aliens who used the app, roughly 895,000 in total, were paroled into the United States.

Needless to say, that did not sit well with the incoming administration, and on March 12, CBP renamed CBP One as “CBP Home”, and reconfigured it to confirm departures of aliens from the United States. As DHS Secretary Kristi Noem explained at the time:

The Biden Administration exploited the CBP One app to allow more than 1 million aliens to illegally enter the United States. With the launching of the CBP Home app, we are restoring integrity to our immigration system.

The CBP Home app gives aliens the option to leave now and self-deport, so they may still have the opportunity to return legally in the future and live the American dream. If they don’t, we will find them, we will deport them, and they will never return.

The rollout of CBP Home coincided with a $200 million ad campaign warning aliens not to enter illegally or, alternatively, to leave voluntarily now and possibly “have an opportunity to return and enjoy our freedom and live the American Dream”. I’ll return to that latter point below.

Registration, Fines, and Prosecutions

Noem didn’t stop with ad campaigns, however.

In late February, she announced that DHS would begin requiring aliens unlawfully present to register with the federal government and be fingerprinted in accordance with section 262 of the INA.

As the department noted in a March 21 announcement, aliens who don’t register or who fail to carry evidence of registration face prosecution and imprisonment for up to 30 days and/or a $5,000 fine.

DHS has also begun referring aliens present in the United States who entered illegally for prosecution under sections 275 and 276 of the INA, as my colleague, Todd Bensman, reported in early April.

“Improper entry” under section 275 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) is a misdemeanor carrying a sentence of up to six months and a fine for a first offense and a two-year felony (and/or a fine) for a second or subsequent offense. In the month of March alone, DOJ prosecuted more than 2,600 aliens for section 275 violations, nearly double the December total of 1,324.

Illegal “reentry of removed alien” under section 276 of the INA carries a base sentence of up to two years’ in prison and a fine, with higher sentences (up to 20 years) for certain alien criminals.

In March, DOJ prosecuted nearly 3,000 aliens for reentry after removal under section 276, a 45 percent increase compared to December, even though more than six times as many aliens were apprehended entering illegally at the Southwest border in December than in March.

The DHS secretary also partnered with Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Scott Turner in early April to deny federal mortgage loans and other HUD benefits to aliens here illegally and to those who harbor them.

As Noem stated at the time: “If you are an illegal immigrant, you should leave now. The gravy train is over.”

“Historic Travel Assistance and Stipend for Voluntary Self-Deportation”

Which brings me to the “Historic Travel Assistance and Stipend for Voluntary Self-Deportation” DHS announced on May 5.

As per the department’s May 5 press release, illegal aliens who use the CBP Home app will be eligible for “both financial and travel assistance to facilitate travel back to their home country”, as well as a $1,000 stipend payable once they confirm their “their return to their home country … through the app”.

Fox News’ Bill Melugin has reported that this program is expected to cost $4,500 per alien (about a quarter of the cost of formal deportation), and that DHS promises “that any aliens who register to self deport will be immediately de-prioritized for ICE arrest and will maintain the ability to return to the U.S. legally in the future”.

The “Three- and 10-Year Bars”

It’s not clear how the Trump administration plans to allow aliens here illegally who depart voluntarily the chance to return legally, at least in the short term, given what’s referred to as the “three- and 10-year bars”. Let me explain.

Under section 212(a)(9)(B) of the INA, aliens “unlawfully present”, either because they entered illegally or were admitted as nonimmigrants and overstayed, and who have remained here illegally for 180 days but less than a year aren’t eligible for lawful admission for three years after they depart.

Unlawfully present aliens who have remained here illegally for a year or more are inadmissible for 10 years under that provision.

There’s a waiver (at section 212(a)(9)(B)(v) of the INA) of the three- and 10-year bars for alien spouses, sons, or daughters of U.S. citizens or green card holders, but only if they can establish “extreme hardship” to their citizen or lawfully resident spouses or parents.

That’s a high burden, but waivers are issued at the DHS secretary’s discretion, and she can define extreme hardship as she sees fit. Perhaps that’s something the administration is considering, and it would likely resolve the issue of the estimated 1.1 million illegal alien spouses married to citizens and green card holders in so-called “mixed status” families.

Or perhaps the administration is considering not enforcing the bars to admission in section 212(a)(9)(B) for aliens who return with visas after voluntarily departing using the CBP Home app, under DHS’s inherent “prosecutorial discretion”.

In its June 2023 opinion in U.S. v. Texas, the Supreme Court held that even the states can’t block DHS’s discretionary non-enforcement of immigration law, but the Biden administration’s refusal to take criminal aliens into custody and deport them in an exercise of prosecutorial discretion was a key Republican issue in the 2024 election, and ultimately led to bipartisan passage of the “Laken Riley Act”.

Plainly there’s a difference between criminal aliens who entered illegally and “otherwise law-abiding” aliens who leave voluntarily and attempt to reenter legally, but expect Trump’s opponents (and some of his supporters) to criticize him for hypocrisy if he attempts to flout Congress’s three- and 10-year bars.

The Costs and the Impact

And expect many conservatives — both those who otherwise support Trump’s deportation efforts and those who oppose everything the 47^th president does — to balk at the prospect of paying illegal aliens to leave, regardless of any other actions his administration takes to allow them to reenter legally.

That said, the fiscal savings are undeniable, not just between this proposal and the costs of formal removal but also the trickle-down savings for states and localities that would otherwise have to pay to educate (at an average cost of $17,277 per year per pupil) and provide medical and public services to aliens who would opt instead to leave.

In addition, the public-safety and national-security benefits of this plan are incalculable, as it would free up immigration officers who’d normally have to investigate, apprehend, detain, prosecute, and remove these aliens to go after criminals and terrorists.

Simply preventing another September 11 would prove this plan a success — provided enough aliens take DHS up on the offer and depart, cash in hand, for it to do any good.

A $1,000 stipend is a big carrot, but the question is whether the administration is using enough sticks to prompt a sufficient number of aliens to accept that money for this plan to do any real good. Time will tell, but you can’t blame Trump for not thinking outside the box in driving down the illegal population.