In May, President Trump signed an executive order establishing Operation Homecoming, a system of self-deportation to help the administration reach its goal of deporting one million immigrants per year.
A recent ad from the Department of Homeland Security implied immigrants in the U.S. without legal status could receive an exit bonus of $1,000 once they provide proof of their self-removal via the CBP Home App.
DHS has also assured self-deportees that they will have a chance to legally return to the U.S. in the future.
The article Can the Trump Administration’s “Self-Deportation” Campaign Succeed? by the non-partisan think tank Migration Policy Institute (MPI), examines those claims.
Co-author Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at MPI, said the administration has used fear to encourage immigrants without legal status to self-deport.
“Life in the U.S. is increasingly so hard for a large number of unauthorized people — the calculus has changed,” he said. “People see television, they see mass arrests, they see pictures of jail in the US … (and) people have doubts about making the move.”
Chishti said the mass deportation program leaves a lot of unanswered questions. Among them, how the government would confirm that someone reached their country of origin.
“If the government had to do this in a very rational way, we would have thought through all these elements before we declared a [self-deportation] program,” he said. “We didn’t. We just declared an offer for people to take or leave it. And that's not the best way of structuring (it).”
