President Donald Trump's new initiative to get people to "self-deport" is using deception to trick people to leave the country, a top immigration expert warned on Monday.
This came in response to a report by Fox News' Bill Melugin about a new policy, to be announced this week by the Department of Homeland Security, through which unauthorized immigrants can apply for their intent to leave the country and receive financial incentives once they are out.
"DHS will announce today that they will begin paying for the commercial flights of illegal aliens who self-deport from the U.S., & they will pay these aliens an additional $1,000 once they are confirmed to have left the country," Melugin posted to X.
"DHS tells @FoxNews this will save American taxpayers 70%, as it currently costs DHS, on average, over $17,000 to arrest, detain, and deport someone from the U.S., while paying for self-removal flights & the stipend is projected to cost just $4,500, and will be safer for ICE and preserve their resources."
According to Melugin, DHS officials say "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. DHS says they have already successfully tested out the financial assistance, recently paying for an illegal alien to fly back to Honduras from Chicago, with more tickets booked this week."
The key problem, warned American Immigration Council attorney Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, is that the insinuation that these people can come back to the U.S. later is wildly misleading.
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"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 U.S. legally in the future,'" wrote Melnick. "Many people who might see this as an option would be put in a WORSE OFF legal position. So this is a TRAP."
Many people in the U.S. without authorization are asylum seekers requesting protection from hardship and persecution in their home countries, and if they were tricked into leaving, it would create an easy excuse for the government to exclude them from such protections if they were to return, he said.
This comes as the Trump administration has sought to legally classify asylum seekers with the same status as other kinds of unauthorized immigrants, — which advocacy groups say is illegal — and as Republicans in Congress propose exorbitant new fees on applying for asylum that could put the entire program out of reach for most migrants.