Self-deportation
Self-deportation is an approach to dealing with illegal immigration, used in the United States and the United Kingdom, that allows an otherwise inadmissible person to voluntarily depart a country for which they have no legal ties to rather than face removal proceedings in front of the native court system. It became associated with illegal immigration to the United States in the 1990s and later prominently with the policy of the Second presidency of Donald Trump in 2025.
History
This term was used as early as 1984 in a People article about the film director Roman Polanski, which referred to his self-deporting. The term gained its current association with illegal immigration in the 1990s, especially in California. In 1994, William Safire described its usage by California governor Pete Wilson's immigration strategy, exemplified by Proposition 187, which prevented illegal aliens from using a variety of state social services. Safire summarized the philosophy of the approach as holding that "the most cost-effective way to change behavior is to make life unbearable under present behavior." The same year, Lalo Alcaraz and Esteban Zul launched a satirical campaign involving a character named "Daniel D. Portado", who facetiously promoted self-deportation.The Trump administration, particularly in the Second presidency of Donald Trump, has strongly encouraged the practice of self-deportation, offering $1,000, travel expenses and forgiveness of previous fines as an incentive to self-deport. Some migrants who have attempted to claim this "exit bonus" have reported difficulties including delayed, misdirected and missing payments and unresponsive contact information when attempting to resolve payment problems. Mother Jones magazine reported that Salus Worldwide Solutions, the company awarded a US$917 million contract to manage the program, had no previous federal contract experience and was connected to a former US State Department official and one of his former colleagues, then the US Department of Homeland Security official in charge of awarding the contract. Critics have argued that the administration has used both fines and lawsuits as a "scare tactic" to encourage self-deportation.