Self-deportation rates have risen significantly in 2025-2026, with reports indicating over 1.9 to 2.2 million undocumented immigrants have chosen to leave the U.S. voluntarily. This surge is driven by heightened fears of, and incentives for, using the CBP Home app for free flights, with many aiming to avoid detention.
We've been over this.
If so many people have self-deported, then why have so few of them claimed the $1000.00 and free ticket?
I mean, if you were planning to leave anyway, why not get a free ticket?
DHS claims of “two million” self-deportations are inaccurate. Aggressive ICE enforcement distorts immigration data and erodes trust.
cmsny.org
DHS’s Flawed Estimate of Self-Deportations Provides a Measure of How ICE Detention Tactics Negatively Impact Immigrant Community Life
The DHS allegation of close to 2 million self-deportations under the Trump administration—roughly equivalent to 15% of the estimated
total population of unauthorized immigrants in the U.S.—would amount to about 200,000 people per month having voluntarily left the country, an exodus not likely to have gone unobserved.
There is also no basis, no exit survey of the legal status of the entire flow of out-migration, to support the deceptive statement that the entire outflow consists of “illegal aliens”. It is more likely that the actual outflow is much smaller, perhaps one-tenth of what is alleged, and likely mirroring the
composition of the detained population, three-quarters of whom have no criminal convictions.
What we do know, according to a
recent national survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the New York Times, is that 15% of all immigrants have
considered leaving, but not that they have “gone home.”
So where is DHS getting its unbelievable numbers on self-deportation from?
Flawed Interpretation of Current Population Survey Data
DHS’s
initial announcement on August 14, 2025 about its success in leveraging self-deportations relied on a chart from
a blog post two days earlier by the anti-immigrant think tank, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). The CIS authors explain that their analysis is derived from the Current Population Survey (CPS) and document their interpretation of the data.
That might make the DHS allegation sound academic and reliable, but experts including the former chief economist for the Congressional Budget Office,
Wendy Edelberg, and the
Peterson Institute for International Economics have explained at length why the estimate is unreliable. Even
the CIS analysts themselves include prominent caveats to explain that the apparent evidence of out-migration might be a statistical artifact.
