Immigrants have been racking up as much as $1,000 a day in fines if they disregard orders to deport, totaling more than $6 billion that the Trump administration now intends to collect.
Since Donald Trump returned to office, the Department of Homeland Security has issued roughly 21,500 fines, part of a pressure campaign to encourage millions of people to leave the country with a promise that the government would waive the fees against them.
In recent weeks, the government has threatened immigrants with lawsuits, debt collectors and massive tax bills if they don’t pay those penalties, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The new system, put in place by the Trump administration in June, means immigrants are not only at risk of arrest and forced removal from the U.S. but also crushing financial debt that is virtually impossible to escape. One immigration attorney told the WSJ that it amounts to “psychological warfare.”
DHS has issued past-due notices for unpaid fines with growing interest and threatened to garnish tax refunds, deploy private collection agencies and alert credit bureaus to delinquent payments owed by targeted immigrants, many of whom are low-wage workers, according to WSJ.
The agency has also suggested it could report unpaid fines to the IRS, which could then treat the balance as taxable income.
The message from Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem “is clear: if you’re in the country illegally, leave now or face the consequences,” a senior DHS official said in a statement to The Independent.
Under rules introduced in June, DHS officers can send letters threatening fees on noncitizens over failure to deport, and all rights of appeal could be eliminated if they fail to reply within 15 days.
The process is permitted under a law passed by Congress in 1996 as part of a wider immigration package. But over the last three decades, threats of fees — which can now reach up to $998 a day — have rarely been enforced. Officers instead focused on removal, rather than adding another layer of punishment.
But that changed under Trump, largely because the process for sending out threatening fines with potentially financially disastrous results is much easier, according to the American Immigration Council, an immigration policy research group.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has vowed to recoup “funds owed to Americans.”
“As part of the effort to fulfill President Trump’s agenda, Treasury’s Debt Collection Service is actively working with ICE to secure payment for all civil fines and penalties owed by illegal aliens to the U.S. government,” Bessent said on social media.
According to TV ads and social media announcements from DHS, immigrants who choose to “self-deport” will “not have to pay these fines.”
Instead, immigrants are offered “financial assistance up to $1,000” and “a free flight home,” as well as “the potential opportunity to return to the United States the legal, right way,” according to the agency.
Immigrants can do so using the CBP Home app, formerly the CBP One app, a Joe Biden-era product that allowed more than 1 million immigrants to begin their immigration process before reaching the country. The Trump administration has revoked legal status for all immigrants who entered the country with that app.
A senior DHS official told The Independent that “iIlegal aliens should use the CBP Home app to fly home for free and receive $1,000 stipend, while preserving the option to return the legal, right way.”
“It’s an easy choice: leave voluntarily and receive [a] $1,000 check or stay and wait till you are fined $1,000 [a] day, arrested, and deported without a possibility to return legally,” the official said.
The American Immigration Lawyers Association has called that promise “a deeply misleading and unethical trick.”
Under current law, anyone living in the U.S. for more than six months without legal permission cannot return as an immigrant for at least three years. Immigrants who were in the country for more than a year could be blocked from reentering for at least 10 years.
Immigrants with a record of deportation also are more likely to face lengthy waiting periods, or outright denials, when applying for future visas.
Noem has claimed that more than 1.6 million immigrants have “left” the country within the first 200 days of the administration.
In May, a Honduran woman who has lived in the U.S. for two decades was hit with nearly $2 million in fines for failing to leave the country after receiving a removal order in 2005.
“I live with anxiety… I can’t sleep… I don’t feel,” the 41-year-old mother-of-three U.S. citizens told CBS News.
Another woman — a mother-of-four in New York who has been living in the U.S. for 25 years and trying to get her removal order tossed so she can get a green card — had considered self-deporting out of fear that the Treasury Department would repossess her house, according to WSJ.
She faces more than $2 million in overdue penalties, with growing daily interest. She could also be subject to administrative costs totaling at least 32 percent of her fine, or more than half a million dollars, according to DHS.
To carry out the president’s plans for mass deportations, the Trump administration has pushed to “de-legalize” millions of immigrants who were granted humanitarian protections and other protective orders to legally live and work in the country.
More than 1 million people are at risk of being removed from the U.S. after the administration revoked Temporary Protected Status for several countries.
Another 1 million immigrants who entered legally through the CBP One app also are at risk of being arrested and removed, while thousands of people with pending immigration cases are being ordered to court each week only to have those cases dismissed, and find federal agents waiting to arrest them on the other side of the courtroom doors.
Those reversals have radically expanded a pool of “undocumented” people to add to Trump’s deportation numbers.
