Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is touting her department’s plan to triple the so-called “bonus” for immigrants who choose to self-deport, goosing it from $1,000 to $3,000 for anyone who signs up by the end of the year.
Gosh, a whole eight days.
Actually, DHS officials are calling it a “holiday stipend,” which is even more gross than calling it a bonus.
Immigrants are right to be wary of this offer, because the government’s execution so far has been patchy at best. Some immigrants who signed up for the offer just never received the promised money or the accompanying plane tickets back to their country of origin. This leaves people in a Kafka-esque limbo where they have already alerted the government to their status as undocumented and where they live, putting a target on their back when they are just trying to get home.
Some people who have agreed to self-deport end up sitting in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention for months anyway, with their money arriving and departing while they are locked up. Sometimes the payment information went to the wrong people. Sometimes people were told the money would be waiting for them when they returned to their country of origin. Narrator’s voice: The money was not waiting there.
But surely all of this will get fixed right quick with the nearly $1 billion sweetheart deal for one of Donald Trump’s donors to run what the administration is also calling “Project Homecoming,” explaining it will offer a “concierge service” at airports for immigrants who self-deport.
This might be more welcome news if that donor, William Walters, had ever handled work like this before, but nope. Instead, it looks much more like the Trump administration just has a lot of cash to throw around.
If the administration was genuinely interested in assisting people with leaving the country, the sum wouldn’t be a paltry $3,000, nor would the program be only intermittently functional.
Related | Homeland Security helps Trump donor make bank on deportation scheme
Contrast this with last week’s news that the bonus to join U.S. Customs and Border Protection is jumping to $60,000. Yes, the people who look at what is happening to immigrants right now in this country and think “Yeah, I could get with that,” would get that $60,000 upon completion of training and moving to a “remote location.”
So, one CBP agent gets a bonus that is 20 times what an immigrant would be given to leave. Also announced last week: People who CBP already employs are now also eligible for bonuses of $50,000 and $60,000, so it’s not really a hiring bonus as much as a “shower cash on everyone who will stay at CBP” bonus.
And CBP can afford it, as they have $285 million set aside just for bonuses.
Just. For. Bonuses.
They have to keep sweetening the pot because, although people seem to be applying to CBP in droves, they are not actually getting hired. Between May and June, CBP got roughly 50,000 applications and hired around 1,200 agents, which is a pretty bleakly small number.
If Immigrations and Customs Enforcement’s corresponding hiring spree is any guide, the white supremacists who are applying for these jobs are not exactly top-quality candidates. ICE has been offering $50,000 bonuses and begging retirees who agree to come back and kidnap immigrants. Those who do get to keep receiving their federal retirement annuity along with a salary ranging from $89,000 to $105,00 and, of course, that bonus.
ICE also got rid of age limits and slashed training requirements. Anything to get violent, morally flexible xenophobes in the door, right?
The government is constructing a very well-funded, very lawless, very secret police, with a goal of 8,500 new CBP employees and 10,000 new ICE agents. But what we’re seeing is that even with all that money, it still doesn’t seem to produce quality applicants, because normal people generally don’t want to be monsters like ICE and CBP agents are.
Meanwhile, the thing that might actually make it palatable and possible for immigrants to leave rather than be thrown into the brutal maw of ICE detention is a pittance, and there’s no guarantee they will ever see the money.
What DHS really wants is to keep brutalizing immigrants with maximum force, while lining some donor pockets along the way.
