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The Trump administration’s efforts to convince illegal immigrants in the United States to deport voluntarily are working.
The Department of Homeland Security announced this month that 1.9 million immigrants who were illegally living in the country have voluntarily departed between January and mid-December, a feat that the White House touted as a crowning achievement thus far.
“President Trump is delivering on his promise to Make America Safe Again and deport criminal illegal aliens,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson wrote in an email. “In record time, we have totally secured the border and are carrying out the largest mass deportation operation of criminal illegal aliens in history. Next year, the Administration will continue to build upon our historic successes with even more deportations.”
An additional 600,000 illegal immigrants, most of whom have criminal histories in the U.S., have been deported by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The self-deportations figure would suggest that the Trump administration has found a way to convince those unlawfully present in the country to leave on their own accord rather than expend costly government resources to find, detain, and remove the “millions and millions” of people that President Donald Trump vowed to round up and deport during his Inauguration speech.
However, some immigration analysts are concerned that the figure is inflated.
David Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute think tank in Washington, D.C., said the real number of self-deportations is likely slightly lower than the one DHS reported.
“It’s likely a little high, just because some people won’t respond to government surveys right now, and some people who are leaving are legal immigrants who could stay, so I don’t know if it’s fair to characterize them as ‘self-deportations,'” Bier wrote in an email.
From campaign promise to reality
The illegal immigrant population in the U.S. soared to an all-time high of 14 million people in 2023 as millions of people who illegally crossed into the country from Mexico during the Biden administration’s border crisis were released into the country and resettled across the nation, according to the Pew Research Center.
Trump won the 2024 presidential election and the popular vote by promising an immigration crackdown and closing the porous southern border. Upon taking office, he issued a wave of executive orders designed to make illegal entry more difficult and ordered ramped-up deportation efforts. Trump also promised to deport 1 million people in his first year.
Within months of taking office, it became apparent that ICE would not meet its 1 million deportations target in its first year, based on projections.
An analysis by the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute concluded that even though arrests climbed after Trump took office, the “current pace of deportations suggests the administration will fall well short of its stated goal of one million deportations annually.”
Around the same time, the Trump administration began to promote self-deportation.
Self-deportations give White House new path forward
Former immigration judge Andrew Arthur explained that convincing the illegal immigrant population to depart voluntarily was part of the Trump administration’s plan all along because ICE’s 6,500 deportation officers did not have the capacity to track down millions of people.
“DHS can’t arrest and deport 15.4 million illegal aliens, but if it simply enforces the law, many aliens will get the message and leave on their own, as hundreds of thousands apparently already have,” wrote Arthur, resident fellow in law and policy at the restrictionist Center for Immigration Studies organization in Washington.
We will not be deterred by leaks. If you come to this country and break our laws, we will hunt you down.
— Secretary Kristi Noem (@Sec_Noem) March 4, 2025
Successful enforcement operation this morning—getting MS-13 members, 18th Street gang members and perpetrators of sexual crimes off our streets. pic.twitter.com/67iqcFJw6x
Trump and his allies began to target illegal immigrants unapologetically in daily posts on social media that threatened to “hunt” down those who refuse to self-deport.
The Trump administration launched a campaign this spring that ridiculed the illegal immigrants whom officers arrested, all in an attempt to pressure others to leave voluntarily or be embarrassed publicly. The flashy mass deportation campaign continues and is intended to make their lives too uncomfortable to remain.
The White House social media accounts publicly made fun of illegal immigrant Virginia Basora-Gonzalez when she was arrested by federal police as a previously deported immigrant who was convicted of fentanyl trafficking.
“She wept when taken into custody (picture attached),” the White House account posted, showing an example of what would happen to illegal immigrants who do not leave the country.
🇺🇸Virginia Basora-Gonzalez, a previously deported alien felon convicted of fentanyl trafficking, was arrested by @ICEgov in Philadelphia after illegally reentering the U.S.
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) March 18, 2025
She wept when taken into custody (picture attached). pic.twitter.com/qwTpCgTRu9
Critics, largely Democrats and immigrant rights advocates, have criticized the videos and announcements, saying they dehumanize immigrants and create fear within minority communities — a point that Border Patrol Chief Mike Banks dismissed.
“There’s zero intent to create public fear,” Banks told the Washington Examiner in March. “The intent is to send a clear message to anyone who wants to come to the country illegally: ‘Do not come.’ If you come to this country illegally, you’re going to be apprehended, you’re going to be prosecuted, and you’re going to be removed. That’s the message we’re sending out.”
In August, DHS announced that well over 1 million illegal immigrants had left the country over the past seven months — primarily people who chose to leave voluntarily.
DHS told the Washington Examiner at the time that it calculated the 1 million figure through unspecified information it received from other countries and through other internal government databases, but did not specify what that meant.
Federal employment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicated that roughly 1 million fewer foreign-born workers were working in the U.S.
However, the chart does not differentiate between legal and illegal immigrants, or whether immigrants out of work had also left the country.
Rewards offered for self-deporting
Alongside its social media campaign promoting self-deportation, DHS rolled out a cellphone app through Customs and Border Protection. The CBP Home app allowed anyone in the U.S. to register with the government and alert CBP of plans to leave the country to avoid being arrested, detained, and later deported by ICE.
Those who signed up through CBP Home and returned home would receive a complimentary one-way plane ticket, a $1,000 payment, and forgiveness for any fines related to failing to depart on time in the case of overstaying a visa.
Even with the cost of a commercial airline ticket and stipend, the price of self-deportation is significantly lower for the government than the $17,100 it pays to deport someone in federal custody.
DHS said this summer that “tens of thousands” of illegal immigrants have used the CBP Home app to facilitate their departure, but did not provide figures as to which countries people returned.
White House border czar Tom Homan told reporters outside the White House in August that the number was much lower.
“Last time I looked, it was about 7,000,” Homan said. “That was weeks ago.”
In late November, Greg Bovino, the Border Patrol’s commander of operations at-large, disclosed in a YouTube interview that “tens of thousands” were starting to use the app to leave.
“[I] talked to the secretary there a couple of weeks back,” Bovino told the podcast Old Patrol HQ. “That’s starting to take off. And I think that that’s going to be a very important, important part of our strategy — will continue to be an important part of our strategy.”
When asked in mid-December to specify how many people had used the CBP Home app from start to finish to leave the country, DHS declined to provide a specific number and pointed the Washington Examiner to a press release that stated 1.9 million illegal immigrants had self-deported in 2025.
ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT WAS RELEASED FROM JAIL BY SOROS DA ONE DAY BEFORE ALLEGEDLY KILLING VIRGINIA MAN
Although DHS has touted that those who self-deport may be able to return to the U.S. if they do so legally, the American Immigration Council’s senior fellow, Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, warned that someone who self-deports and does not have a criminal record would be unable to return to the U.S. through a visa for 10 years.
“Many individuals who leave the United States will never be able to come back in,” Reichlin-Melnick said. “There is no line that they can stand in or pathway that they can enter. The legal immigration system is not an option for them.”
