The Trump administration keeps offering a single solution for immigrants worried about their futures in the United States: deport yourselves. Losing your Temporary Protected Status? Self-deport. Worried you’ll die in immigration detention? Self-deport.
But what does “self-deportation” actually mean?
The answer matters on two levels. For individuals and families, being pressured to “self-deport” — whether by a detention officer where they’re being held, by the officials conducting their ICE check-ins, or by government-sponsored ads and the rhetoric of Trump administration officials promising them an easier time if they leave on their own — leaving the United States is both a logistical proposition and an act with enormous legal consequences. It’s important to know the economic and legal costs and benefits.
For anyone who’s trying to assess the Trump administration’s immigration record, the answer matters for a completely different reason.
Administration officials have been claiming since January that 2.2 million people had “self-deported” under the first year of the Trump administration. I’d expect to see a version of this number — probably even bigger — get tossed around frequently by administration officials in the runup to the midterm elections.
In general — and this will be a theme of this column — nothing said by this administration should be taken on faith without written backup, and we have no idea how they got to 2.2 million. After all, the “Self-Deportation” page on ICE’s website defines self deportation as “leaving the U.S. before you encounter immigration officials” — which raises serious questions about how those same immigration officials can count the departures accurately.
We know that DHS keeps a statistic called “known self-departures,” but we don’t know how that statistic itself is generated. Furthermore, that statistic isn’t publicly reported. The last press report referencing it dates back to April 2025 — the month before the Trump administration started its big self-deportation push. Called Project Homecoming, the initiative promised logistical support and cash stipends ranging from $1,000 up to $2,600 for people who agreed to self-deport.
It’s possible that the “known self-departures” number is what administration officials are drawing on when they tell the public that 2.2 million people self-deported in Trump’s first year. But we have no particular reason to believe that’s the case. It’s far more likely that the internal records tracking “known self-departures” represent only a fraction of what they’re taking credit for in public.
What we do know about Project Homecoming — which is an umbrella name for a bunch of initiatives carried out by government contractors, from creating web portals to placing contractors in detention centers to encourage people to take the deportation deal — completely contradicts the ICE website’s claim that self-deportation means leaving before you’re encountered by immigration officials.
In March, CNN reported on internal DHS documents claiming that 72,000 people had taken advantage of the government’s self-deportation incentives — but that the majority of those were already in immigration detention. As I’ve pointed out in this column before — and as anyone who is in contact with detained individuals knows — the Trump administration has set up a perfect storm in detention facilities: conditions are miserable, court success seems impossible, and every day detainees are reminded that they could just give up on their cases and go home. It’s hard to know where simply offering someone an alternative becomes coercing them into taking the deal.
All of this brings us back to the cost-benefit analysis question. What are people getting who take the government up on its offer? This might seem to just be a question of “is the government paying out the money it promises?” And if that’s the question, the answer is certainly not “yes.”
In December, an executive at Salus, the company executing at least some of the self-deportation contracts, testified in a lawsuit that over 34,000 people had been subjected to “Assisted Voluntary Return,” and that 17,000 stipends had successfully been executed. That is, at best, a pretty big lag between taking the deal and getting the money. And other reporting has since indicated that some people aren’t getting the money at all, sometimes because they were held in detention for so long after taking the deal that the wire transfer with their stipend had expired.
But money can’t buy you rights, anyway. Because “self-deportation” isn’t a real legal term, it tells you nothing about what the legal implications are for someone who might have a pending application for legal status — as many asylum-seekers in detention do, for example — or for someone who might have a chance at obtaining legal status in the future, through, for example, a U.S. citizen spouse or child.
Once you have a deportation order on your record (an “order of removal”), you have triggered several restrictions on your ability to immigrate legally in the future. A removal order, for example, typically triggers a 10-year bar against future legal entry.
There is, in fact, a legal alternative to a removal order that avoids some (though not all) of these restrictions. That is called “voluntary departure.”
Accepting voluntary departure — which can be granted by an immigration judge, or by the Department of Homeland Security if someone chooses to abandon their immigration case before getting a hearing — requires the immigrant to leave the country within a certain period of time. It also constitutes an acceptance from the immigrant that they weren’t legally admissible to the U.S., and forces them to abandon any pending applications for relief, including asylum. But, unlike deportation under a removal order, voluntary departure comes with an easier path to apply for legal status from outside the U.S. in future (for those who had that option to begin with).
The Trump administration’s rhetoric toward the people it is pushing to self-deport actually avoids the term “self-deportation” — and instead, uses a lot of words that sound like voluntary departure.
The Safe Journey Home portal — which promises travel support for people who wish to self-deport — uses the term “Assisted Voluntary Return,” for example. But buried in the FAQ’s is an acknowledgment that while it is a departure, and it is voluntary, it is not a “voluntary departure” in the legal sense. A similar disclaimer appears in the FAQs for CBP Home, the app the Trump administration repurposed to encourage people to register their “intent to depart.” In other words, you may be signing up voluntarily, but you’re not necessarily avoiding a removal order on your record.
Data from the Deportation Data Project, which extends through the early months of this year, shows that 19,543 people who had been arrested and/or detained by DHS accepted “voluntary departure” or “voluntary return under safeguards” between May 9, 2025 (the day that Project Homecoming was announced) and December 1 — compared to the 34,000+ “self-deportations” claimed by the contractor over that time. And while the CNN article reported that 72,000 people had taken a self-deportation deal “as of this month” — and that “most of those were already in immigration detention” — the DDP numbers show just shy of 35,000 people with a departure date of March 10 or earlier who were categorized as voluntary departures or as “voluntary returns under safeguards.”
Importantly, many of those people were granted voluntary departure by the immigration judge — which is to say, it wasn’t because they accepted a deal from an ICE contractor. (According to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, from May 2025 to February 2026 judges granted voluntary departure in nearly 49,000 cases where the immigrant was detained — a reminder that agreeing to give up your case doesn’t actually mean the government is going to deport you on an efficient basis.)
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There probably are some cases in which ICE itself is granting a “voluntary departure” to someone who takes a deal of “Assisted Voluntary Return,” but it doesn’t appear that there are too many. It’s more likely that the actual document such an immigrant agrees to sign is some form of a removal order — which will trigger serious legal consequences of which they may not be aware. (Interestingly, the testimony from the ICE contractor also referred to a program called “Incentivized Voluntary Departure” — but we have no details on what that is, whether it is in fact “voluntary departure” in the legal sense, or how many people have accepted it.)
If you aren’t already in immigration court — if you are, indeed, someone who has the option of self-deporting “before you encounter immigration officials” — the government offers assurances that if you register your intent to depart on the CBP Home app, you will be “temporarily deprioritized” for arrest and detention. But that’s not codified beyond the language on a website. And, it didn’t take me terribly long, in reporting this column out, to hear cases in which people had been told at an ICE check-in to use CBP Home, had done so, and then been arrested, detained, and deported anyway. Even if that is in fact a violation of agency policy — and we don’t know for sure that it is — how is someone supposed to demand accountability for it when they’re in Camp East Montana or already back home?
If you or someone you know is considering leaving the U.S. on your own initiative, please consult a reputable immigration lawyer to understand your options and the potential consequences. The government hangs a lot of promises on “self-deportation,” but at the end of the day, the only thing you can take to the bank is the common-sense definition: you’re removing yourself from the United States.
