President Donald Trump’s deputies have persuaded more than 7,000 migrants to self-deport, at a savings of roughly $16,000 per person, according to The Atlantic.

3,000 self-deporting migrants have left the country, and more are expected, the article noted:

I checked with half a dozen or so immigration attorneys to see if they have clients considering the administration’s offer. No takers yet, they said. “I have a feeling that it will start happening soon,” Jonathan Ryan, an attorney in Texas who represents asylum seekers and refugees, told me. “People are in shock right now, but I suspect the next step will be to start looking at their options.”

The self-deportation number is likely far higher than 3,000 because many other migrants are quietly moving back into Mexico as they try to hide their history as illegal migrants.

Additional data suggests that a million or more migrants have self-deported to their U.S. homes as they try to avoid ICE actions. Their mass withdrawal from work and consumerism also increases the economic pressure on many other working migrants to quietly go home before they are suddenly deported without their savings and possessions.

Administration officials are trying to deport 1 million migrants a year.

But that ambitious goal will dramatically spike additional self-deportations by millions of migrants who dare not work, drive, or use government resources without the risk of being suddenly detained and deported without their hard-won possessions.

Democrats are trying to prevent a sudden flood of self-deportations by obstructing ICE operations and by providing aid to poor migrants.

In turn, the Department of Homeland Security is boosting the self-deportation numbers with a $200 million advertising campaign — and the very visible pressure ICE checks and arrests, the Atlantic article noted:

The Department of Homeland Security recently published a promotional video showing happy-looking families boarding a self-deportation flight to Honduras and Colombia after accepting the cash stipends. DHS called it “Project Homecoming”; staffers handed out free toys on the tarmac. One young family got a stuffed elephant and a handful of Colombian flags before climbing the stairs to the plane. A staffer handed a pink teddy bear to a shy little girl who looked no older than 3. No one in the video explains why they chose to leave or even speaks at all.

For example, a convicted drug offender has self-deported back to South Korea 50 years after being brought to the United States by his mother, said a June 23 report by KITV. “I was just very lucky to deport myself, remove myself, because they were ready to lock me up [for drug offenses],” [Sae Joon] Park said.

So far, ICE has also formally deported 120,000 migrants in this fiscal year, far more than the 8,740 migrants deported from interior locations in 2024. Roughly 59,000 additional migrants are being held in detention as their deportation paperwork is being filed, according to CBS.

Pro-migration advocates are also complaining that too many migrants are being sent home — often amid diversionary complaints that too-few criminal migrants are being deported.

For example, NBC News reported that criminals were just one-third of the arrested migrants during Trump’s administration from October 1 to May 31:

A total of 185,042 people arrested and booked into ICE facilities during that time; [but only] 65,041 of them have been convicted of crimes. The most common categories of crimes they committed were immigration and traffic offenses.

Almost half of the people currently in ICE custody have neither been convicted of nor charged with any crime, other ICE data shows.

…

The new data obtained by NBC News shows that from Oct. 1 to May 31, ICE arrested 752 people convicted of homicide and 1,693 people convicted of sexual assault, meaning that at the absolute most, the Trump administration has detained only 6% of the undocumented immigrants known to ICE to have been convicted of homicide and 11% of those known to ICE to have been convicted of sexual assault.

NBC News and other advocates want Trump’s agencies to stop deporting illegal migrants unless they are convicted of violent crimes. That policy was established by President Joe Biden’s pro-migration border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas. The policy led to a mass rush by roughly 10 million migrants into Americans’ housing, communities, and workplaces, ensuring massive wage losses, job losses, inflation, rent increases, crimes, and Trump’s presidency.

The Mayorkas cheap-labor economic policy is being pushed by several business-funded Republicans, including Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-TX).

“I want them doing that type of work, not raiding Home Depot and, you know, fending off violent riots,” he told NBC News, adding:

“One can say, you know, ‘I deported 1,000 people today,’ and someone can say, ‘Wow, you’re doing such a great job.’ Well, if, of those thousand people, none of them are convicted criminals … have you truly made our community any more safe than it was before?”

Gonzalez, along with five other GOP legislators, sent a June 11 letter to Trump’s ICE chief, saying:

While we do agree that we are a nation of laws—and that all who crossed our borders illegally are subject to those laws—there are levels of priority that must be considered when it comes to immigration enforcement. Every minute that we spend pursuing an individual with a clean record is a minute less that we dedicate to apprehending terrorists or cartel operatives.

“We need to give absolute priority to every violent offender and convicted criminal illegal alien present in our nation, ” the GOP legislators said.

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