Trump Has A Powerful Strategy To Get Immigrants To ‘Give Up’

After more than a decade of living in the United States without incident, 19-year-old Emerson Colindres, a budding soccer star who had just graduated high school, was arrested this summer during an immigration check-in and spent two weeks in a county jail before being deported to Honduras.

Days later, his mother and sister made a decision that likely pleased the Trump administration: They followed Colindres out of the United States.

Colindres’ mother, Ada Bell Baquedano Amador, told Spectrum News 1 that she and her two kids had left Honduras to escape rampant violence in the country. In 2023, an immigration judge denied their asylum application and issued a final order of removal. Now, Baquedano Amador was wearing an ankle monitor, and the Trump administration had given her 30 days to leave the United States. With her son gone, she decided to return with her daughter to the country they’d once fled.

“Thank God, this is all going to be over,” Baquedano Amador said.

That sentiment, variations of which have reverberated across the country, is exactly what President Donald Trump wants. There are millions of undocumented people in the United States ― far more than Trump will likely be able to deport on his own. So the administration is working overtime to create a pervasive atmosphere of punishment, uncertainty and fear that it hopes will convince people in the immigration legal system to leave the United States on their own.

The Trump administration has claimed that those who “self-deport” now will get the chance to reenter the U.S. later. (“Self-deport” is not a legal term; two Mexican American satirists invented it over 30 years ago.)

But leaving the country without following specific legal procedures could make it far more difficult to return ― and the administration has consistently failed to inform people in immigration proceedings of crucial details that could affect their future cases.

Meanwhile, the administration has filled airwaves with advertisements urging people to leave the country, plastered jails and courtrooms with misleading information, cut funding for legal aid programs, announced steep penalties for not leaving the country after receiving a removal order, revived a World War II-era law threatening criminal prosecution unless people who aren’t citizens register with the government, and massively ramped up efforts to arrest and jail people during the course of their proceedings. Officials have also used the brutal conditions in immigration detention as self-deportation propaganda.

“DHS has made it abundantly clear that those who are in our country illegally have a choice — they can leave the country voluntarily or be arrested and deported,” a department spokesperson told HuffPost in a statement.

Some of the intimidation and pressure tactics are obvious, like painting immigrants as “foreign invaders,” or having masked agents jumping out of rental trucks and making arrests in immigration court. Others are just coming into view. The New York Times reported last week on a pattern in which immigration officials have arrested and detained parents, separating them from their children and threatening to send the children to shelters unless the parents agree to be deported as a family ― an echo of Trump’s first-term “family separation” policy. And a DHS spokesperson recently pressured DACA recipients to “self-deport,” even though the program offers a temporary protection from deportation.

Voluntary departures from the U.S. have spiked in recent weeks.

The fear tactics and hyperaggressive enforcement, critics say, have also turned the immigration system on its head.

Where the government was once at least marginally concerned with protecting the legal rights of migrants and asylum seekers, it is now actively seeking to subvert those protections, all with the goal of purging the United States of millions of unwanted neighbors as quickly as possible.

“I really feel like the whole purpose behind this is to overwhelm the system at every single point possible,” said Imelda Maynard, director of legal services at Estrella del Paso, which provides free immigration legal services to migrants and refugees in West Texas and New Mexico.

“It’s all working hand-in-hand to try and get people to have no hope, and to just say, ‘This is too hard, I give up.’”

The pressure campaign has included a sustained effort to limit legal resources available to people in immigration detention.

Unlike in criminal court, people in immigration proceedings are not guaranteed a lawyer if they can’t afford one, even though legal representation is a key factor in the success of immigration cases.

To help address this gap, the federal government has historically provided funding for efforts like the Legal Orientation Program, in which legal service providers give people in immigration detention information about the immigration system and their legal rights.

Not anymore. The Trump administration terminated these programs in April. Legal aid groups have sued in response, and while some terminations have been halted by judges, children and adults alike are being left without key legal information as their cases proceed.

For Estrella del Paso ― which is among those fighting in court to restore the legal aid programs ― the terminations have ended access to lists of who is being held in local immigration detention centers, as well as eliminated the free, private phone lines detainees once used to consult with the group’s staff in confidence.

With the legal aid programs gone, the Trump administration has pursued an aggressive, often misleading campaign to convince people to simply leave the country, even though this could end up negatively impacting future efforts to reenter the United States.

“You have a cutting off of information first, so that people don’t have access to correct information, followed by disinformation ― and then chaos,” Maynard said.

Case in point: The Trump administration has blanketed detention centers and immigration courtrooms around the country with posters pressuring people to abandon their legal cases and leave the country. Attorneys and other observers say the information on the posters is misleading or downright false.

One version of the poster, a red-and-blue “Warning To Self-Deport,” has been spotted across the country in hallways, detention center libraries, and attached to case files ― “even orders granting relief, like asylum,” according to Amelia Dagen, a staff attorney for the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, which provides free legal representation to people in the immigration system and participates in impact litigation.

“Individuals who have just won asylum are eventually going to be eligible to apply for green cards, and then for citizenship, and so this messaging about self-deportation doesn’t even apply to them, because they are no longer deportable,” Dagen added. (Like Estrella del Paso, the Amica Center has sued the administration over terminations of legal aid programs in which it participates.)

But the issues with these posters go far beyond who’s receiving them.

Among them: The posters make no mention of the expansive legal rights of undocumented people to remain in the United States. People who fear persecution in their home country are allowed to remain in the United States while they make an asylum case to an immigration judge, for example, or to pursue protections under the international Convention Against Torture.

But the poster doesn’t say any of this. Instead it uses charged language that has no legal significance ― “illegal alien,” “self-deport” ― and absolutist phrases that don’t represent how immigration law actually works. For example, it threatens “immediate deportation” for people who don’t immediately leave on their own, though so-called “expedited removal” only applies in specific circumstances. Similarly, it warns of being “barred from returning,” even though bars to reentering the United States are based on individual circumstances and are often temporary.

What’s more, the poster ignores the fact that simply leaving the United States could have catastrophic legal consequences. If someone leaves the country without resolving their immigration case ― and if they miss a scheduled immigration hearing as a result ― they could receive a deportation order in absentia, which in turn could make them ineligible for certain forms of legal relief in the future, or possibly lead to a bar on reentry. For those who have lived out-of-status in the United States and accrued “unlawful presence,” leaving the country this way could lead to a multiyear bar on coming back to the United States.

One U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement “Self-Deportation” webpage does acknowledge this issue, but makes no firm commitment to addressing it.

“If you’re already in proceedings before a Department of Justice immigration judge, leaving may result in a bar to reentry, which means you may not be able to return to the U.S. for a specific period of time,” the page says. “ICE may agree to seek dismissal of removal proceedings if you prove you left the U.S. on your own — and that way, you may be able to avoid getting a final order of removal (and the negative consequences that come with it).”

There are specific ways people can leave the country while protecting their legal rights, including requesting voluntary departure from an immigration judge. But every immigration case is unique, and respondents should ideally work with an attorney to chart their path forward ― something else the poster doesn’t mention.

Instead, it vaguely promotes “future opportunity for legal immigration” if people heed its warning.

Trump’s attacks on legal aid programs, combined with his administration’s aggressive focus on pressuring people to surrender their rights, is a noxious mix, especially for the most vulnerable populations in detention.

When Senate Judiciary Committee ranking member Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) visited Florida’s infamous Krome detention center in June, his staff observed that the center’s Behavioral Health Unit ― “a unit dedicated to assisting individuals with mental health needs” ― had “a flyer in a common room in the unit that asked, ‘Do you want to go home?’ and provided information about how to self-deport.”

Two months prior, the administration had ordered legal service providers to discontinue the National Qualified Representative Program, which for over a decade provided government-funded attorneys for people in immigration proceedings who’ve been found mentally incompetent to represent themselves.

Three weeks ago, a federal district judge ordered the administration to reinstate the policy, writing in a motion granting plaintiffs’ request for a preliminary injunction that without the program, “People who have been adjudicated by immigration courts to be mentally incompetent under existing procedures will be left to do precisely what a court has just found they are not capable of doing—represent themselves in legal proceedings.”

“Although Defendants insist that there are sufficient safeguards in place without the NQRP to mitigate the harm to individuals deemed mentally incompetent, the record provides substantial reason to conclude otherwise,” Judge Amir Ali of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia wrote.

It’s not clear how many people who qualified for that program gave up their legal rights in the intervening months.

The Trump administration, particularly Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, has been explicit that it is leveraging the terror of languishing behind bars, for months or even years, in order to coerce people into leaving the country.

In March, after the Trump administration sent hundreds of Venezuelan men, without charge, to El Salvador’s most infamous prison for indefinite detention where they faced brutal beatings and alleged sexual assault, Noem shot a video from inside the prison.

“I also want everybody to know: If you come to our country illegally, this is one of the consequences you could face,” she said. She called the prison, Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, “one of the tools in our toolkit.”

Then, in May, Noem said, “If you are here illegally, self-deportation is the best, safest and most cost-effective way to leave the United States to avoid arrest.”

And during a July press conference marking the opening of the “Alligator Alcatraz” detention center ― the tent city was erected on a Florida Everglades airfield in a matter of days, and is already renowned for its terrible conditions and ostentatious cruelty ― Noem, sitting next to Trump, held up a flier urging undocumented people to leave the country.

“If you don’t,” she warned, “you may end up here.”

Noem and others in the administration have worked hard to make that threat a reality.

The administration has abandoned the Biden-era policy of prioritizing the arrest of serious criminals and recent arrivals, and is instead detaining whoever it can get its hands on, including by arresting people at immigration court, carrying out large-scale raids and pressing people on the street to share information about their immigration status. The number of people in immigration detention hit a record high in June, and the share of those arrested by immigration agents who don’t have any criminal record at all has continued to increase, according to the government’s own data.

“On the ground, people are very concerned and fearful, because even people who know their rights are seeing that ICE is not abiding by the law,” said Jessie Hahn, a senior counsel for labor and employment policy at the National Immigration Law Center, an advocacy organization focused on low-income immigrants. Hahn recounted a know-your-rights training for farmworker advocates and attorneys in California, where federal law enforcement has carried out raids targeting agricultural workers.

“I was getting all these questions in the chat, like, ‘What about when they break the car windows?’ And it gets to a point where I’m not sure what to say to people, other than ‘call the television station,’ because that’s a violation,” Hahn said. “And our ability to hold them accountable for that violation is really important, and yet there are widespread violations happening on the part of ICE right now, in the way that arrests are being conducted.”

At the same time, conditions in detention centers have grown dire, veteran legal observers say.

“The conditions are the worst that we’ve ever seen,” said Denise Noonan Slavin, who spent decades as an immigration judge, including 15 years at the Krome detention center in Miami.

“People are basically being treated like animals, in unsanitary conditions, with no access to medical care, legal counsel or family,” said Slavin, who is now a senior adviser at Americans for Immigrant Justice, a nonprofit law firm involved in several lawsuits against the administration. (The DHS spokesperson told HuffPost the same thing it has told dozens of other outlets since July: “Any claim that there are subprime conditions at ICE detention centers are false.”)

Slavin said people seem to be “disappearing” for days at a time in ICE’s network of detention centers, and noted that 2025 has been a particularly deadly year for immigration detention, in part because immigration agents are arresting people who in the past likely would have been allowed to live freely.

Isidro Perez, a 75-year-old man who arrived in the United States from Cuba in 1966, was one of those who recently died in ICE custody. Perez served an 18-month prison sentence in 1984 ― 40 years ago ― on cannabis charges, but had lived the intervening decades without incident, The Miami Herald reported, working as a mechanic, and rescuing cats and dogs.

He was arrested by immigration agents at a Key Largo community center in June, and died three weeks later. Perez’s friend and former partner told the Herald he’d called her from detention, describing sleeping on the floor in an overcrowded facility. Yet another man died in ICE custody last week.

In the past, immigration detention was reserved for the tiny fraction of undocumented people seen as a danger to the community, or as flight risks. But over time, through Democratic and Republican presidents, the number of people in detention has grown dramatically. Now, the Trump administration has moved to prohibit bond hearings for people who crossed the border without authorization, a description that applies to millions of people, and one that means people arrested could remain behind bars for months or years as their cases proceed. And billions of dollars in new funding from Congress could explode the number of available detention beds.

Immigration detention is not like federal or state prison; people aren’t sent there after receiving a conviction and a sentence, and it’s not supposed to be a punishment.

But that’s how the administration is treating it. A “Self-Deportation Fact Sheet” warns that if undocumented people don’t leave the country, “ICE will put you in a detention facility. Some people remain in detention for months.”

“People in detention are there indefinitely,” said Silky Shah, executive director of Detention Watch Network. “They don’t have a sentence, they don’t actually know when or if they’ll be released, whether they’ll be released back into the United States, or if they’ll be deported. So there’s just so much deep uncertainty.”

That uncertainty “does a lot to psychologically compel somebody, and they might be like, ‘These conditions are terrible, this is awful, maybe deportation is an answer,’” Shah said.

Because “self-deported” isn’t a legal category, we don’t have precise numbers regarding how many people have voluntarily left the United States. We also don’t know what the Trump administration considers a “self-deportation,” or if they are counting these figures in their overall deportation numbers.

But there are signs the administration’s push is having its desired effect.

More immigration cases concluded with voluntary departures in June than in any other month for at least 27 years, according to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC, an independent organization that collects and analyzes federal records. Still, this is partially a result of the Trump administration’s fixation on immigration enforcement. Recent months have seen highs for immigration court outcomes overall, and voluntary departures made up a very small portion of the sum of people leaving the country as a result of immigration proceedings.

“Case records from [the Executive Office for Immigration Review] confirm what many have witnessed in courtrooms across the country,” said Adam Sawyer, a data analyst at Relevant Research. “About 3,700 people chose to voluntarily depart in June 2025. That’s more voluntary departures than we have seen in any single month since at least 1998.”

“Even when faced with the potential of danger that can come with a return to one’s country of origin, thousands of people are choosing to forgo further participation in the U.S. immigration system, deeming it to be a worse option among the available bad options,” Sawyer added.

CBP Home, the Trump administration’s app for immigrants to “report their intent to depart,” provides some more insight. The app is a mutation of the Biden-era “CBP One” app, which allowed people to schedule asylum appointments with immigration officials. Now, on the contrary, the “self-deport” posters decorating detention centers and courthouses ― as well as Noem’s television advertisements ― direct people to the app as a first step toward exiting the United States. In exchange, the administration has promised to cover travel costs, waive fines related to immigration offenses, and even give out $1,000 “exit bonuses.”

DHS did not answer questions about how much money has actually been distributed, but a spokesperson pointed to a press conference Noem held Friday, in which she said that “thousands and thousands” of people had used CBP Home. Noem also said “hundreds of thousands of people” ― and later, “over a million people” ― had left the United States on their own accord without necessarily using the CBP Home app. She did not cite any evidence for the claim, other than what she said she’d heard from foreign officials.

DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told NPR in April that “5,000 people have used the app to self-deport as of the start of April,” in the outlet’s words. On June 25, The Atlantic cited an unnamed senior administration official who said “that more than 7,000 people have signed up so far, and of those, more than 3,000 have confirmed departures using the app.” On July 23, CBS News referred to internal government data to report “the Department of Homeland Security has tracked over 13,000 self-deportations since the start of Mr. Trump’s second term.”

“If you go on the CBP Home app and go home now, you will get the chance to come back to the United States legally,” Noem claimed during the “Alligator Alcatraz” press conference. Otherwise, you may end up deported “and never get the chance to come back,” she said. But being deported doesn’t necessarily equate to a lifelong ban on reentry, and there’s nothing to indicate using CBP Home has any affect on someone’s ability to come back to the United States at a later date.

The CBP Home app seemingly does not include any acknowledgement of the rights immigrants could be abandoning if they leave the country the wrong way. A DHS privacy impact assessment makes no mention of sharing any data on voluntary departures with the immigration court system.

And despite Noem’s statement about “the chance to come back” to the U.S. ― and similar, even-less-legible noise from Trump ― the administration has not gone to Congress with any proposal for making legal reentry easier for people who voluntarily leave the country.

The Migration Policy Institute, a think tank that studies immigration, summarized the issue in June: “Noem and other administration officials have also said that self-deportees ‘may still have the opportunity to return legally in the future and live the American dream,’ which may seem to offer a new immigration pathway or access to a visa. How the administration could accomplish this is unclear, given most unauthorized immigrants are barred from re-entry for multiple years and it is the absence of sufficient legal pathways in the first place that has prompted many to enter illegally or overstay a visa.”

“The CBP Home self-deportation thing is a joke, from a legal perspective,” said Austin Kocher, a professor at Syracuse University who studies trends in immigration enforcement.

“Your ability to either come back or not come back has nothing to do with CBP Home,” he added. “There are people who are leaving, and they’re going to have a bar [to reentry] and they’re going to technically, legally, ‘abandon’ their applications for relief and get an in-absentia removal order… At the same time, [the administration has] said, ‘Use this app or we’re going to find you and deport you. And you’re never going to be allowed to come back.’ Well, that’s not true, either. That is not an honest, factual statement. Deportation does not automatically result in a permanent bar.”

Several people have also run into trouble after attempting to leave the country without identification documents ― which they either didn’t have to begin with, or were taken by immigration agents in the United States, Noticias Telemundo reported last month.

And though the administration promised to “deprioritize” the detention of people who sign up to leave the country through CBP Home, that’s not guaranteed. Last month, a man who pursued voluntary departure through CBP Home was arrested by immigration agents who falsely accused him of skipping appointments, 285 South, a metro Atlanta immigration-focused publication, reported.

The man, who went by the pseudonym David, joined the ranks of nearly 60,000 people in immigration detention ― the very thing he was trying to avoid.