The Trump administration has significantly increased its cash incentive for undocumented migrants willing to leave the United States voluntarily, raising the payment from $1,000 (£741) to $2,224 (£2,400), with additional paid travel, according to Bloomberg. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced the move as part of what officials described as a holiday-season effort to accelerate removals before the end of the year.
‘Illegal aliens should take advantage of this gift and self-deport because if they don’t, we will find them, we will arrest them, and they will never return,’ Noem stated, Bloomberg reported.
The Administration’s Savings Argument
Officials argue that the voluntary departure programme results in savings for taxpayers. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) estimates that arresting, detaining, and removing a single migrant costs approximately $17,000 (£12,600) on average.
White House adviser Stephen Miller took this further. ‘Each self-deportation saves taxpayers up to a million dollars (or more) in future benefits,’ he wrote on X. However, as Bloomberg noted, Miller provided no evidence or elaboration for this claim, and DHS did not respond to requests for comment regarding the calculation.
The figure of a million dollars in savings warrants scrutiny. According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion (£71.7 billion) in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022 alone. More than a third of those payments, around $34 billion (£25.2 billion), went to Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment insurance programmes—services these workers are largely barred from accessing.
The Real Cost to Taxpayers
While the per-person deportation cost is roughly $17,000 (£12,600), the broader enforcement infrastructure demands far more. Congress approved an extraordinary $170 billion (£136 billion) for immigration and border enforcement in July 2025, according to the American Immigration Council. This included $45 billion (£36 billion) allocated specifically for new detention facilities capable of holding over 116,000 individuals—a 265% increase in ICE’s detention budget.
The Brennan Center for Justice reports that ICE’s total budget for this fiscal year now stands at nearly $28.7 billion (£21.2 billion), almost three times the agency’s entire budget from the previous year. This figure alone surpasses the combined budgets of all other non-immigration federal law enforcement agencies.
Numbers That Don’t Match the Rhetoric
According to DHS, 1.9 million undocumented migrants have self-deported since January 2025, with tens of thousands using the CBP Home app. Bloomberg noted that these figures could not be independently verified.
Meanwhile, forced deportations have fallen significantly short of the administration’s stated goal of one million removals in its first year. Since taking office, the Trump administration has deported just over 335,000 people, according to ICE data cited by Bloomberg. During the same period, ICE arrested more than 285,000 foreigners accused of being in the country illegally.
If the CBP Home programme is succeeding, critics ask, why has Congress allocated billions for expanded detention capacity that the administration may never need to utilise?
Doubts About the Promise of Return
Immigration lawyers have expressed concerns about one of the programme’s central claims. Bloomberg previously reported that migrants who leave voluntarily often face automatic re-entry bans lasting years, for which waivers are rarely granted, contradicting DHS assertions that voluntary departure preserves the option to return legally.
A Broader Crackdown
The increased bonus accompanies other restrictive measures. The administration announced it would re-examine refugee cases from the Biden era and freeze green card applications. It has also expanded its travel ban from 19 countries to more than 30.
The Cato Institute estimates that mass deportation efforts could ultimately cost American taxpayers close to $1 trillion (£741 billion), when factoring in lost tax revenue and reduced economic activity.
For ordinary taxpayers observing these mounting figures, the question remains: is the government spending billions to save a few thousand dollars, or is there a deeper, more costly strategy behind these policies?
Originally published on IBTimes UK
