At his Senate confirmation hearing in March to become the next secretary of homeland security, Markwayne Mullin explained how his tenure would be different from that of his attention-seeking predecessor, Kristi Noem. “My goal in six months is that we’re not in the lead story every single day,” Mullin said.
Gone for now are the concentrated surges into American cities leading to dramatic — and sometimes deadly — clashes between immigration agents and protesters. Mass raids of Home Depot parking lots in search of undocumented day laborers are no longer routine. Immigration enforcement officials continue to deport nearly 1,000 people a day, many of them with no criminal record. But the Trump administration is also ramping up another strategy: to take apart immigrants’ lives, piece by piece, until they decide to leave the country altogether.
In February, the Department of Housing and Urban Development proposed a new federal rule blocking “mixed status” families from living in publicly subsidized housing, which could cause an estimated 80,000 people to lose their homes, including about 37,000 children, nearly all of them U.S. citizens. Starting in March, roughly 200,000 immigrants began losing their commercial driver’s licenses, under a new ban on truckers who are asylum seekers, refugees or undocumented immigrants who arrived as children. The Trump administration has reportedly weighed an order that would require banks to verify their customers’ citizenship status. Access to capital has already been curtailed. Starting last month, noncitizens can no longer obtain small business loans through the federal government, even if they are here legally.
Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s anti-immigration agenda, is lobbying Republican-led states to cut off services. In a meeting last month in Washington, he asked Texas lawmakers why they had not already passed a bill ending public education funding for undocumented children.
In this, the administration is learning a lesson familiar to past presidents of both parties: Millions of people without the right papers are deeply embedded in American society. Even with the world’s most expansive — and expanding — deportation apparatus, the United States does not have remotely enough bureaucratic bandwidth to remove immigrants en masse. And as the public turns against the administration’s most visible, aggressive methods, it’s no surprise it is resorting to another strategy.
Self-deportation is an idea with deep roots. Well before the United States established its first immigration court, the government systematically pressured people to leave by making their lives intolerable. But perhaps no president has made self-deportation such an explicit policy, or taken it to such extreme lengths, as Trump. The Department of Homeland Security regularly trumpets a standing offer to pay $2,600 to any immigrant who exits the country, more than double the sum being offered a year ago. “Home is just a few clicks away!” the department posted on X last month, while also offering a free flight to a home country.
As the Trump administration shifts its strategy away from audacious, citywide raids, it seeks to apply pressure at every point of contact between immigrants and the government, using the country’s vast bureaucracy. But the most important tool for encouraging self-deportation today is the same as it was more than a century ago: fear.
A History of Fear
Immigrants decide to leave this country all the time. They might have always had temporary designs on the United States, a place to simply earn a degree or save some money. A 2010 study found that about one-third of immigrants eventually return to their home country.
Others make the decision less freely. Many unauthorized immigrants, when confronted by a government agent, are pressured to leave rather than fight an official deportation order and risk detention. Adam Goodman, author of “The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Expelling Immigrants” and a professor at the University of Illinois Chicago, estimates that about 85 percent of all deportations in U.S. history fall into this category.
Self-deportations are a hazier, unofficial category. The immigrants who self-deport may never cross paths with an agent of the government, making them nearly impossible to count. They may even be in the country legally. And while historians have documented that some leave because their neighbors made their daily lives miserable, many are undeterred.
Going back to the colonial era, there have been efforts to pressure people into self-deporting. In the late 19th century, state and local officials on the West Coast passed laws designed to make Chinese immigrants leave: denying them admission to hospitals and public schools, banning their firecrackers and ceremonial gongs. When these measures didn’t substantially reduce the Chinese population, or temper the anger of white residents, Congress passed the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which restricted Chinese immigration and expanded the government’s power to deport.
Citizens still turned to racial terror: They set fire to Chinese businesses and homes, erected gallows, hung effigies and even murdered Chinese residents. In 1885 and 1886, at least 168 communities drove out their Chinese residents with mob violence, the historian Beth Lew-Williams writes in her book “The Chinese Must Go.” Yet all these threats ultimately yielded only partial results. Many Chinese decided to stay in the country. And despite the ban, unauthorized immigrants continued to arrive.
At the turn of the 20th century, amid a nationwide anti-immigrant panic, the federal government passed laws to restrict immigration and deport more people. In 1924, Congress established the Border Patrol. But self-deportation endured; it was too convenient a method when the number of unwanted people outstripped the government’s resources. It also became intertwined with the formal deportation system: Officials learned that the more terrifying they made the prospect of deportation, the fewer people they would have to remove.
During the Great Depression, local officials across the country blamed Mexican Americans for the sudden lack of jobs. State and federal agents worked together to conduct surprise sweeps designed to terrify people into leaving. One local director of immigration in Los Angeles explained that while “the machinery set up for deportation would be entirely inadequate on a large scale,” he believed that “with a little deportation publicity, a large number of these aliens, actuated by guilty self-consciousness, would move south and over the line on their own accord particularly if stimulated by a few arrests.” Between 1929 and 1939, at least half a million people left the country, according to Goodman.
Half a century later, the West Coast again played host to the old idea. Anti-immigrant feeling swelled in California as the state faced an economic downturn and rising unauthorized Mexican migration. In 1994, California passed Proposition 187, which barred hospitals and schools from serving undocumented immigrants. Federal courts would eventually strike down the law, but many states followed suit. At the time, the national effort was pushed by Kris Kobach, a conservative law professor who later became Kansas’ secretary of state, who argued that with a full-blown self-deportation policy, the country could halve its undocumented population. And the government would not need to remove anyone “at gunpoint,” as Kobach explained in an interview, calling his self-deportation plan “a more humane way.”
In 2010, Arizona passed a landmark anti-immigration bill that was unmistakably designed with self-deportation in mind. Lawmakers declared in the text of the bill that “the intent of this act is to make attrition through enforcement,” borrowing from the title of a 2008 paper by Kobach on self-deportation. The law allowed the police to demand “papers” if they suspected a person was undocumented. The police could also arrest a person without a warrant if they suspected the person should be deported. Elements of this law, too, would be struck down by courts, but not before it had its intended effect. An estimated 100,000 Hispanic residents left Arizona the year the law was passed, though some might have left because the state was in the middle of a recession.
Under the second Trump administration, the federal government is making national policy from the ideas that drove the California and Arizona laws. Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, passed last summer, cut health care benefits for immigrants, including many who are here legally. It also imposed a 1 percent tax on remittances and significantly raised fees for immigrants seeking humanitarian protection through due process.
But the most powerful incentive for self-deportation, in the past and today, is the legal deportation process itself. In expanding the number of immigration agents and warehouses, Trump’s bill fortified a national architecture of fear, one that is reinforced daily by the reports — in the news media and by word of mouth — of inedible food, inadequate medical care and the denial of religious rituals in detention centers.
Reshaping the Country
But does terrifying people into leaving the country work? Only partly, and it’s difficult to measure. Those who go of their own accord tend to leave no paper trail. A CNN report last month found that only 72,000 had taken the Trump administration’s much-advertised financial incentives to self-deport — nowhere near the promised 2.2 million.
Most people cling to their lives in the United States — however difficult they become — because they can no longer imagine being anywhere else. Nearly half of the country’s undocumented immigrants have lived here for two decades or more. More than 30 percent are homeowners. And the more difficult it becomes to traverse the border, the less likely some people are to leave, for fear that they won’t be able to return.
“Some people more risk-averse will leave, and the ones who stay will be terrified,” says K-Sue Park, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who argues that the threat of deportation is a way to keep certain people, especially low-paid workers, in check. “They won’t be able to do anything. They won’t even attempt to exercise any of the rights they might exercise.”
A self-deportation campaign of fear can still reshape the country, though. What such policies succeed most in doing is driving undocumented people further underground. They vanish from schools and churches, retreating to an ever smaller circle of daily life. They avoid seeking basic medical care, including vaccinations that are important for protecting the health of the broader public. They are more likely to drive without insurance or a license, making roads less safe for everyone.
And the terror spreads well beyond those who are ostensibly being targeted. By definition, the net is broad, catching far more people than the number who can be deported. The threat of profiling based on race and ethnicity — now permitted by the Supreme Court — has led some citizens to carry their passports with them. Green card holders, once close legal kin to citizens, are being advised by their lawyers to take extra precautions when they leave the country and return. A decades-old misdemeanor charge, however minor, can now lead to detention. As the country has seen, people with green cards, student visas and temporary protected status — legitimate under one president, then void under another — have discovered the fragility of their status.
With Trump retreating for now from showy street-level crackdown, self-deportation is the growing shadow zone of our immigration system, in which threats and intimidation operate where the law will not or cannot go. It is less visible by design. But whether or not people decide to leave this country, the fear that has been let loose is here to stay.
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