Incentives: Trump’s Self-Deportation System Seems to Be … Working?

How old am I? Old enough to recall when the political world scoffed at Mitt Romney’s suggestion that illegal aliens would “self-deport.” Even Donald Trump sounded skeptical in the 2012 cycle:

Romney’s solution of “self deportation” for illegal aliens made no sense and suggested that Republicans do not care about Hispanics in general, Trump says.

“He had a crazy policy of self deportation which was maniacal,” Trump says. “It sounded as bad as it was, and he lost all of the Latino vote,” Trump notes. “He lost the Asian vote. He lost everybody who is inspired to come into this country.”

The GOP has to develop a comprehensive policy “to take care of this incredible problem that we have with respect to immigration, with respect to people wanting to be wonderful productive citizens of this country,” Trump says.

Four years later, Trump had clearly changed his mind on illegal immigration. During his first term, in fact, voluntary departures increased enough that even Politico took notice of it. However, even then, the numbers seemed relatively small next to the scope of the issue – and that was before the Biden Regency threw the southern border open and allowed millions more illegal entrants into the country. Politico noted nonetheless that voluntary departures had increased to a seven-year high of 29,818 in 2018. The data came from court applications responding to the only incentive in play at the time, which was that a voluntary departure approved by immigration courts would allow aliens to become eligible for legal re-entry later. 

After Joe Biden’s border crisis and the resultant flood of illegal entries, however, Trump needed a more industrial set of incentives to address the issue. He immediately ordered the Department of Homeland Security to create a system in which self-deportees could get thousands of dollars to defray costs as well as establishing eligibility for legal return, as long as they committed no crimes while in the US. At the time, people scoffed that the program would likely do little to lighten the load for ICE.

Actually, as Axios reports today, Project Homecoming has achieved success on an order of magnitude larger than Trump’s first-term incentives produced:

President Trump’s controversial “self-deportation” program, which pays unauthorized immigrants to leave the U.S., is on pace to account for more than 200,000 departures, according to internal data shared with Axios.

Why it matters: Launched last year alongside a multimillion-dollar ad campaign, the initiative is virtually the only carrot in an aggressive immigration crackdown that has been long on sticks.

• Through July 16, the nearly $600 million program — dubbed Project Homecoming by the Department of Homeland Security — has helped about 132,000 people exit the U.S.
• Roughly 70,000 more have signed up and are on track to leave, according to the data.

Ah … incentives. How do they work again? Speaking of which, roughly half of those who chose the program did so while staring down the less-pleasant incentives:

• About half of the self-deportations have involved immigrants held in detention, under an effort that accelerated the departures and began when a DOGE staffer brought Project Homecoming into ICE facilities.

Initially, Axios reports, Project Homecoming pushed out nearly as many illegal aliens in its first six months as DHS did in all of 2018. That pace did not satisfy Trump, however, who has pushed hard for immigration officials to ramp up self-deportations. DHS expanded the staffing for the program and added more incentives, including a reduction of detention time by two-thirds for those already caught by ICE. That also helps free up beds at detention centers, an ongoing issue for which Republicans created a $75 billion capital fund in the One Big Beautiful Bill to use for the expansion of holding facilities. 

That’s not the only incentive in play for the Trump administration, either:

Each self-deportation is costing the government about $2,500, plus the stipend paid to the deportee, DHS says. Removing an immigrant who doesn’t volunteer for deportation costs about $18,245, the agency said.

That will save DHS more than two billion dollars in the long run, its spokesman claims. 

The real incentive in play, though, is the clear intent and will from Trump to enforce immigration law and keep the border secured. Everyone knows now that Trump isn’t fooling around, and also that he’s not all that concerned over the optics of enforcement. If DHS had rolled out Project Homecoming during the Biden Regency, it would have been a joke told about the impotence of immigration enforcement. Now that the potency has been restored, it’s the most reasonable option for people who are looking at the business end of a deportation anyway, and for those who don’t want to be put in that position in the first place.

Incentives matter. That’s why it’s important to set them properly, a lesson that the Biden Regency never learned but Trump knows only too well. 

Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump, illegal immigration into our great country has virtually stopped. Despite the radical left’s lies, new legislation wasn’t needed to secure our border, just a new president.

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