Immigrants paid $1k to self-deport could be allowed back ‘if they’re good people,’ Trump says

Donald Trump’s administration is promising $1,000 to undocumented immigrants to voluntarily leave the country, but only “good people” and “industrious people that could love our country” will be allowed to return, according to the president.

The Department of Homeland Security on Monday announced that “illegal aliens” who use the CBP Home app to “self-deport” will receive “financial and travel” assistance — including $1,000 “paid after their return to their home country has been confirmed through the app.”

“If you are here illegally, self-deportation is the best, safest and most cost-effective way to leave the United States to avoid arrest,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a statement.

Trump and administration officials contend that people who use the app to report their own removal will be provided an opportunity to return to the country legally. But under current law, anyone living in the United States for more than six months without permission cannot return as an immigrant for at least three years. Immigrants who were in the country for more than a year could be blocked from reentering for at least 10 years.

Immigrants with a record of deportation also are more likely to face lengthy waiting periods, or outright denials, when applying for visas.

“We’re gonna pay each one a certain amount of money and get them a beautiful flight back to where they came from, and they have a period of time, and if they make it, we’re gonna work with them so that maybe someday, with a little work, they can come back in,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday.

“If they’re good people, if they’re the kind of people we want in our company, industrious people that could love our country. And if not they, won’t. But it will give them a path to you know coming back into the country,” he added.

“If they miss that limit, they’re gonna be taken out of our country, and they never have, and they have never, they will never get a path to come back in, and it’ll be a much tougher process. And it’s called self-deportation,” he said.

The proposal follows stagnant deportation numbers within the first few months of Trump’s presidency despite his anti-immigration agenda promising sweeping removals.

The administration shut down the Joe Biden-era CBP One app, which granted immigrants a legal pathway to enter the United States, and relaunched the app as CBP Home so users can notify the government their intent to leave the country.

At least 5,000 immigrants have reportedly used CBP Home to announce they were voluntarily leaving the country, according to the Migration Policy Institute, an immigration think tank.

The Trump administration is now battling in courtrooms across the country to summarily remove dozens of alleged Tren de Aragua gang members, labelled “alien enemies” who can be summarily deported from the country under his invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, a centuries-old wartime law most recently used to detain Japanese Americans during the Second World War.

The law grants authority to the president to remove targeted immigrants during a declared war or if there is an “invasion” or “predatory incursion.”

Last week, a Trump-appointed federal judge in Texas delivered yet another blow to the president’s so-called “mass deportation operation” with a ruling that found the government does “not possess the lawful authority” to summarily deport alleged Venezuelan gang members under his use of the Alien Enemies Act.

Federal judges across the ideological spectrum have also rebuked the administration for failing to retrieve a Salvadoran father living in Maryland who the administration admitted was wrongly deported to a notorious jail in his home country by “error” despite a court order preventing that from happening.

A unanimous Supreme Court agreed that the government must “facilitate” Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s return, and that “the United States acknowledges that Abrego Garcia was subject to a withholding order forbidding his removal to El Salvador, and that the removal to El Salvador was therefore illegal.”

The president and his allies have raged at court decisions blocking his agenda, accusing judges of obstructing what he calls a “mandate” from voters to remove millions of undocumented immigrants.

Trump and his allies have accused judges of demanding “trials” for targeted immigrants, despite the fact that immigration courts do not have juries or witnesses and serve under the Department of Justice and at the direction of the attorney general.

“It’s a very difficult thing with the courts. The courts have all of a sudden out of nowhere have said maybe you have to have trials. We’re gonna have 5 million trials? Doesn’t work. Doesn’t work,” he said Monday. “You wouldn't have a country left. But hopefully the Supreme Court will save it.”