WASHINGTON — President Trump proposed Tuesday that illegal migrants who self-deport would get priority consideration for legal status if they still want to live in the US — even saying the government would provide them a plane ticket and cash to speed the process along.
“We’re going to give them a stipend,” Trump, 78, told Fox Noticias host Rachel Campos-Duffy in an interview aired Tuesday.
“We’re going to give them some money and a plane ticket, and then we’re going to work with them,” he added. “If they’re good, if we want them back in, we’re going to work with them to get them back in as quickly as we can.”
Trump insisted that the administration’s priority is still deporting migrant criminals — not those who merely crossed the border illegally.
“We want our great people to stay,” he said in response to a question from Campos-Duffy about an illegal migrant who had been in the US for 20 years and built a family.
“One of the things I am doing, though, is I’m also making it easier on the farmers and the hotels and everything, because you have a lot of farmers that they’re not going to be able to, you know, do their crops and pick up the corn and do all of the things that they do so incredibly well,” Trump said about having migrants come back into the US.
If illegal migrants choose to use the administration’s CBP app to self-deport, they have a better shot at coming back to the US legally, Trump vowed.
“Ultimately, at some point we want the people to go out [and] come back as, as legal. You know, we’re going to send, as you probably know, we’re doing a self-deportation and we’re going to make it comfortable for people, and we’re going to work with those people to come back into our country legally.”
The Department of Homeland Security retooled former President Joe Biden’s CBP One app last month to enable migrants to announce their self-deportations — instead of allowing them to come to the US through a legal pathway on their cellphones.
The app was used to admit 936,500 people between January 2023 and December 2024, according to DHS data.
The nearly one million migrants were issued a warning last week to self-deport “immediately.”
“Formal termination notices have been issued, and affected aliens are urged to voluntarily self-deport using the CBP Home App. Those who refuse will be found, removed, and permanently barred from reentry,” a DHS spokesperson told The Post at the time.
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