• The Trump administration will pay US$1000 ($1677) and provide travel for undocumented migrants who ‘self-deport’.
• Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said self-deportation is the safest and most cost-effective option.
• The programme aims to reduce deportation costs by 70% using the CBP Home App.

The Trump administration today said it will pay for the travel and give US$1000 ($1677) to undocumented migrants who “self-deport” back to their home country.

US President Donald Trump said some of the undocumented migrants who take advantage of the self-deportation scheme will be given a path to legally return to the United States.

“We’re going to pay each one a certain amount of money, and we’re going to get them a beautiful flight back to where they came from,” Trump told reporters during an event at the White House.

“We’re going to work with them so that maybe someday, with a little work, they can come back in if they’re good people, if they’re the kind of people that we want in our [country],” he said. “It will give them a path to coming back into the country.”

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, announcing the travel assistance and US$1000 stipend programme, said “self-deportation is the best, safest and most cost-effective way to leave the United States to avoid arrest”.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is “offering illegal aliens financial travel assistance and a stipend to return to their home country through the CBP Home App”.

CBP Home refers to an app already created by the DHS through which people can deport themselves.

DHS said the stipend of US$1000 will be paid after a person’s return to their home country has been confirmed through the app.

“Self-deportation is a dignified way to leave the US and will allow illegal aliens to avoid being encountered by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice),” the department said in the statement.

DHS said that even with the payment of travel assistance and the stipend “it is projected that the use of CBP Home will decrease the costs of a deportation by around 70%”.

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It said the average cost currently to arrest, detain, and remove an undocumented migrant is US$17,121.

DHS said an undocumented migrant from Honduras had already taken advantage of the programme to return home.

Trump pledged during his presidential campaign to carry out mass deportations and claimed during the White House event that there are as many as 21 million undocumented migrants in the United States.

However, the number of undocumented migrants stood at 11 million in 2022, according to Pew Research Centre estimates based on data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

– Agence France-Presse