The Trump administration has found a new way to pressure undocumented immigrants to leave the country. It is penalizing some of them with fines of nearly $1,000 a day for every day they stay in the country illegally.
So far, the administration has imposed $2 billion in fines on nearly 7,000 people who have failed to leave the country after either being ordered to do so or saying they would voluntarily go, according to Tricia McLaughlin, a homeland security spokeswoman.
President Trump has opened a major crackdown on immigration since he took office, using aggressive tactics to pursue arrests and deportations. But there have been roadblocks, including a lack of resources to carry out his big promises.
Officials have also encouraged migrants to leave the country voluntarily by offering them free flights and $1,000 stipends. This week, dozens of migrants leaving the country voluntarily were flown to Colombia and Honduras.
The fines are part of the effort to get people to “self-deport.”
It’s unclear whether the government has collected on any of the fines, but officials said that they could garnish wages, issue liens against property or refer people to private collection agencies to enforce the fines levied against them.
Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, said the fines are “yet another aspect of a multifaceted pressure campaign.”
She continued: “This is clearly a strategy to make conditions so inhospitable that noncitizens end up leaving.”
The government imposed similar fines during Mr. Trump’s first presidency.
Back then, however, the crackdown appeared to be targeted at migrants who were hiding from federal immigration officers in U.S. churches. The cases of the migrants finding sanctuary in the churches gained national attention in the first few years of the Trump administration as a sign of resistance to Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown. In 2019, The Times spoke with migrants in churches who faced fines of nearly $500,000.
During the Biden administration, officials moved to cancel most of the fines and the Department of Homeland Security stopped issuing them altogether. The agency said then that “the fines were not effective and had not meaningfully advanced the interests” of D.H.S.
“There is no indication that these penalties promoted compliance with noncitizens’ departure obligations,” Alejandro N. Mayorkas said in a statement in 2021, when he was homeland security secretary. “We can enforce our immigration laws without resorting to ineffective and unnecessary punitive measures.”
Scott Shuchart, a lead official with Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the Biden administration, criticized the effort as a “cynical ploy.”
“Nobody will pay the fines, but nonpayment of the fines can bootstrap ICE into pursuing liens and other ways to ruin the lives of people who haven’t necessarily committed any crimes,” he said.
Hamed Aleaziz covers the Department of Homeland Security and immigration policy for The Times.
The post Trump’s New Penalty for Undocumented Immigrants: Billions of Dollars in Fines appeared first on New York Times.
