President Donald Trump will take money out of accounts intended for foreign aid as part of his plan to pay immigrants to leave the country, The Washington Post reported on Tuesday morning.
This plan, devised in secret, "was in development before a related May 5 announcement from the Department of Homeland Security declaring that immigrants who volunteer to 'self-deport' to their home countries would be eligible for $1,000 stipends from the U.S. government," reported Adam Taylor and Martine Powers for the newspaper.
Trump's self-deportation scheme is intended to be a cheaper alternative to rounding up and deporting those immigrants, and the administration has told them that if they take part in this program, they may be able to return at a later date.
But legal experts have warned this could actually make it harder to get legal status, particularly if the people in question had been here to claim asylum from hardship or persecution in their home countries.
Although it's not unheard of to use foreign aid to repatriate migrants, the report noted, Trump's plan "is unusual because it includes people who escaped from some of the most dangerous parts of the world and appears intended to bypass the International Organization for Migration (IOM), a U.N.-affiliated body that typically aids in returning migrants to their homes."
The other issue is that it comes as Trump moves to "drastically slash foreign aid, most notably by dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and terminating 80 percent of its programs, including those that served Ukraine, Haiti and other troubled countries."
Officials at the Department of Homeland Security have said the documents the Post obtained on this plan were "predecisional" and "outdated," but it appears the plan is moving ahead in at least some form: "DHS and the State Department signed an agreement last week that details the same process, and includes the $250 million figure in foreign assistance funding that would support it, but does not name any specific nationalities that would be targeted for voluntary return."
Yesterday, CNN reported that the first planeload of such "self-deporting" volunteers landed in Honduras — and some of them were traveling with U.S. citizen children in tow.
