The Department of Homeland Security is stepping up efforts to persuade fraudulent immigrants to self-sell them by providing $1,000 in salary and travel assistance.
The federal agency announced Monday that those who voluntarily leave the US using the CBP Home app received support “to promote travel to their home country” and “the $1,000 paid after returning to their home country has been confirmed through the app.”
The announcement comes as the number of deportations remained stagnant for the first 100 days of President Donald Trump’s inauguration. One of the president’s important campaign promises was to enact a massive deportation as soon as he took office.
The DHS did not immediately respond to questions about how the funds were provided or what evidence was needed to show that the person has returned to his home country.
DHS spokesman Tricia McLaughlin said in late March that self-promotional people can use biographic data, documents, facial images and GEO locations in the app to prove they have left the country. “Aliens need to be at least three miles from the US to make good use of this feature,” she said. “Using the validation feature is optional, but if an alien chooses to use it, you will need to submit a facial image. It’s necessary.”
In a press release, DHS Director Christa Noem said self-denial was “the best, safest, and most cost-effective way to leave the US to avoid arrest.”
According to the DHS, a single deportation costs $17,121 taxpayers. Federal agencies hope that self-deportus will reduce its costs by 70% even after considering scholarships.
So far, at least 5,000 migrants reportedly said they have voluntarily departed using CBP Home, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington think tank.
DHS refuses to say what fraudulent immigrants who have never used the app before have used it to self-promotion.
According to AppFigures, a company that tracks app downloads, the CBP Home app has recently been downloaded about 1,500 times per day. The app has been downloaded about 300,000 times since its launch in 2025, according to the company’s CEO Ariel Michaeli.
In March, the Trump administration reused one Biden-era CBP app that allowed immigrants to legally enter the US as asylum seekers and to change to CBP home apps. This version of the mobile application has a self-deprecation reporting feature.
The Trump administration spent $200 million to improve the app and create an accompanying advertising campaign featuring NOEMs to promote app use.
Ads aired in English and Spanish in the United States and Mexico encourage immigrants who are not legally present in the United States to leave the country.
As part of Monday’s announcement, DHS said “undocumented migrants who voluntarily submit their intention to self-denial at CBP homes will also be stripped for detention and removal prior to their departure, as long as they show that they are making meaningful progress in completing their departure.”
The agency also said through the app that self-deports “may help illegal foreigners maintain their options for legally re-entering the US in the future.”
Immigration experts and advocates have previously warned about NOEM’s self-abolition message and the possibility that they could legally return to the US
“The surgical term for quotes from the secretary is ‘May’,” Kathleen Bush Joseph, a policy analyst for the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Institute for Immigration Policy, told NBC News in March.
“For many people leaving the US, there may never be a legal option to return to the US, and re-entry may be banned for years,” Heidi Altman, vice president of the National Center for Immigration Law, advocacy organization, told NBC News in a statement in March. “We force or force people to leave their homes, and our loved ones are responsible for political, moral and economic costs.”
