A young, pregnant Venezuelan woman came to the US without documentation last year. After giving birth and settling in Ohio, she found that trying to stay in the country was too hard. She had no family support for herself and her newborn, and struggled to find work and housing. So she decided to self-deport.
The Trump administration has been virtually begging immigrants in the US to self-deport. It’s self-deportation, the White House says, or risk the wrath of ICE, the country’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
But self-deportation has been nearly impossible for this woman and others like her, lawyers and immigration activists tell WIRED. Guidance from the US government for those who have decided to self-deport has been confusing and sparse, leaving many immigration attorneys and advocates in the dark. Some immigrants trying to leave the country voluntarily through government-endorsed mechanisms say they have found themselves in limbo or, worse, detained.
CBP Home, the app from Customs and Border Protection that’s supposed to help immigrants self-deport, is only somewhat helpful, and it launches some immigrants into a confusing and drawn-out bureaucratic process, says Jessica Ramos, an immigration attorney practicing in Ohio who represents the stranded woman. That, coupled with little help from the US government, has made getting out of the US “an odyssey,” Ramos claims.
Ramos’ client, who asked not to be named but gave permission for her story to be shared, does not have a Venezuelan passport or the money for a flight. She says she filled out her information on the CBP Home app, then received a notice that she would receive a call from the US government to help her arrange her departure. She says the call never came.
This isn’t what’s supposed to happen: In March, the Department of Homeland Security released CBP Home, which theoretically facilitates self-deportation, providing a form for undocumented immigrants to fill out. It also offers help booking tickets for those needing assistance, the waiving of fines, “cost-free travel,” and a $1,000 bonus. Those who use the app aren’t supposed to have criminal histories and are also meant to be “temporarily deprioritized” for detention and deportation. Initially, CBP Home was advertised as an all-in-one app that would help with everything from travel documents to financial assistance.
Immigration has become the centerpiece of the Trump administration’s policy agenda, and the White House has heavily encouraged immigrants in the US to leave of their own volition. On May 9, the White House announced Project Homecoming, claiming the government would provide assistance for immigrants seeking to leave. According to the presidential proclamation, Project Homecoming promises to facilitate “travel for those lacking valid travel documents, and offers a concierge service at airports to assist with booking travel.”These services, the project said, would eventually be backed with $250 million the government had previously utilized to support refugees. In a statement issued in October, DHS claimed that more than 1.6 million people have “voluntarily self-deported” in 2025.
“It’s proven very difficult to get clear information from the government,” says Jennifer Ibañez Whitlock, senior policy counsel at the National Immigration Law Council.
According to Ramos and other immigration lawyers, CBP Home “is mostly a self-reporting tool as opposed to [how] they initially advertised it.”
Ramos says she attempted to contact the local Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) office to help her client from Venezuela self-deport, but couldn’t get through. “They no longer have a way to reach them,” she says. “It all goes to a customer service hotline of sorts.”
So Ramos helped her client pack her bags. “I literally walked her into the [local] ERO’s office and said, ‘She’s ready to go home. You can have her. She’s with her son. She has provisions for a couple of days now. Please take her home.’” Ramos claims that the staff at the ERO office told her, “‘We’re not a travel agency, she just needs to go home on her own.’”
When Ramos pointed out that the agency advertises help for people who want to leave, she says they said that was a national office initiative. Ramos and her client eventually left.
She says her client has still been unable to leave the US. “She’s desperate to go home,” says Ramos.
“For those who come here illegally and lack travel documents, DHS is actively working with the State Department to acquire travel documents,” claims DHS assistant secretary for public affairs Tricia McLaughlin. “Additionally, if an illegal alien designates a third country and has the required travel documents, DHS will assist with their travel … DHS offers full-service assistance and contacts eligible participants during the process via phone or email. This is to expedite the vetting or arrange travel.”
Others who attempt to sign up for self-deportation through CBP Home have faced the opposite problem: being detained despite trying to leave voluntarily.
“When the CBP Home app was introduced, we asked our members to let us know about their experiences using it,” says Vanessa Dojaquez-Torres, practice and policy counsel at the American Immigration Lawyers Association, a nonprofit organization for immigration lawyers. “We’ve heard of a couple cases of people using the app to try to facilitate their return to their home country, but they still end up getting detained, either while they’re waiting for their flight out of the country or while they are physically trying to leave the country.”
For those who do manage to successfully self-deport using the CBP Home app, the Trump administration says it will offer a financial reward of $1,000. But few of the attorneys and experts who spoke to WIRED knew of cases where people had received that money once they left. (On Monday, DHS seemingly offered a Cyber Monday deal with the same $1,000 stipend to anyone who agreed to self-deport, continuing the Trump administration’s efforts to turn mass deportation into one big joke.)
In May, a group of voluntary deportees to Honduras and Colombia received Visa debit cards loaded with the promised $1000. Ibañez Whitlock, the senior policy counsel at the National Immigration Law Council, says the government has since switched to wire transfers due to issues people had accessing the funds on the cards. While she says that the National Immigration Law Council has heard of at least some self-deportees receiving the $1,000, it’s unclear exactly how many people have gotten paid.
“I have not heard of any cases of people successfully using it and receiving that money,” says Dojaquez-Torres.
“To say that illegal aliens have not ‘received’ their stipend is grossly misleading and factually incorrect,” claims McLaughlin. “This streamlined self-deportation process does involve vetting to make sure there is no fraud and that those deemed ineligible, like criminal aliens, cannot abuse this program. Everyone who is eligible and qualifies to receive a stipend to date has been issued a stipend.” DHS did not respond when WIRED asked how many immigrants have received the stipend.
When reached for comment, the White House referred WIRED to DHS.
Receiving the stipend, should it happen, can bring its own complications. On October 3, the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the government’s programs of unaccompanied minors, confirmed the release of a memo informing those working with undocumented teenagers in HHS shelters that DHS would be offering “a one-time resettlement support stipend of $2,500” to children 14 years and older “who have elected to voluntarily depart” the country.
Lawyers who spoke to WIRED alleged that the offer was hardly voluntary. Children who did not sign could be detained indefinitely, and lawyers claim that DHS indicated that their families living in the US could be arrested and deported. Children who aged out of being minors while in custody would also face the risk of being immediately transferred to a regular ICE holding facility.
“We have real concerns regarding the coercive way that this is set up, as well as the lack of transparency,” says Laura St. John, legal director at the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project in Arizona. St. John says at least one client who was approached about the $2,500 offer was asked to sign a document that she says would have waived their rights to fight their case in immigration court, but also future potential asylum claims. St. John alleges the agreement also included “major fees and penalties if the child should ever return.”
Some advocates are also concerned about who could take advantage of these payments to children. “It’s important to understand that a lot of these kids are either smuggled or trafficked into the United States,” says Wendy Young, president of Kids in Need of Defense (KIND), a nonprofit that provides pro bono legal representation to unaccompanied minors. “Those criminal elements would certainly be aware that a child was returning home with $2,500 potentially in their pocket, or to be paid after their return. That would have put them at greater risk and vulnerability of the cartel who trafficked or smuggles them coming back in and saying, ‘I want that money.’”
“Many unaccompanied minors had no choice when they were dangerously smuggled into this country. ICE and the Office of Refugee and Resettlement at HHS are offering a strictly voluntary option to return home to their families,” claims McLaughlin. “This voluntary option gives UACs a choice and allows them to make an informed decision about their future.”
Dojaquez-Torres says that the government has also begun to exert a new kind of financial pressure on immigrants leaving the US. In addition to leveling fines that totaled millions of dollars against immigrants should they stay in the US, the country has frozen the US-based assets of some deportees after they return home, Dojaquez-Torres says. That measure was previously reserved for people with ties to criminal activity.
But the worsening conditions in detention facilities has continued driving people to self-deport. “Even if they have a legal mechanism to potentially stay in the United States, [people] are giving up on their cases because they’re just so concerned about going into detention,” St. John says. “This administration is using every possibility to make life unlivable in this country for people.”
Those with an existing immigration case who opt to take voluntary departure, where an immigrant can pay for their own trip home within a certain window of time allocated by a judge, have also faced difficulty.
In Colorado, a Venezuelan woman who was granted voluntary departure says she was turned away at the airport. The woman’s husband had been detained and deported; she wanted to leave with him. Her hope was initially to leave in the spring, says Andrea Loya, the executive director at Casa de Paz, an immigrants’ rights support group in Colorado, who was working with the woman.
Her request to leave, Loya says, was granted: The woman then bought $3,000 worth of plane tickets to leave the country. But when she showed up at the airport, she wasn’t allowed to board, Loya says. “They didn’t have passports when they made it to the airport … she couldn’t leave the country by air.”
The woman was frustrated enough to eventually show up at the local detention facility in Aurora, Colorado, and ask the guards to deport her. Just like Ramos’ client, she says she was told to leave. Loya says that she has since lost contact with the woman “because she decided to essentially coyote her way to Mexico … She was going to try to [go by land] from Denver to Mexico City to try to see if she could get documents there.”
A Colombian immigrant, John Arguelles, opted for voluntary deportation while held in detention at an ICE facility owned by the private prison company Geo Group. In order to purchase his ticket home, says Loya, money had to be transferred to his account via Access Corrections, the third-party commissary app used by Geo Group, which allows people to send money to those in detention. Holly Cheng, a volunteer with the immigrant rights group Aurora Unidos CSO, who knew Arguelles, transferred the money to his Geo account.
The money, Cheng says, took several days to clear. By that time, Arguelles had been moved to another detention facility and was unable to access the money needed to buy his flight home. He remained in detention for weeks before being finally deported to Colombia in November. (When reached for comment, Geo Group referred WIRED to ICE; Access Corrections did not reply to a request for comment.)
Arguelles’ wife, Heidy Blanco Velasco, opted to self-deport via CBP Home. While she managed to make it to Colombia, she’s still waiting on the $1,000 she was promised.
This is an edition of the Inner Loop newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.
