What The Hell America!

Customs and Border Protection’s Home app, complete with a “self-deportation reporting feature” for undocumented migrants who plan to leave the United States. It’s a repurposed version of the CBP One app, which the Biden administration had used to process asylum claims from people waiting at the US-Mexico border.

According to DHS, the old app will automatically update to the new version, which it noted is “also available free across mobile application stores.” It’s part of a $200 million ad campaign announced in February, telling migrants they will be “hunted down and deported” unless they “leave now,” which DHS says may give them “an opportunity to return and enjoy our freedom and live the American Dream.”

For now, it is unclear how these reports will be used, or how the Trump administration plans to convince people to use the app, as voluntary departures are not otherwise recorded by migration authorities. It is also unclear how authorities plan to use the information. But Bindhu Vijayan, the executive director of Beyond Legal Aid, which operates on a community-activism-lawyering model, described the app as misleading.

Vijayan told Jacobin:

If someone has already decided to leave, regardless of the consequences, they will proceed accordingly. However, for those who are under the impression that this is a viable pathway for return, they are being misled — manipulated through partial truths and a lack of full disclosure. This is not just misinformation; it’s a calculated strategy that plays on fear and uncertainty, layering coercion upon coercion. The rhetoric surrounding this issue feeds into that fearmongering, reinforcing a narrative designed to control.

The term “self-deportation” may take many readers back to the 2012 presidential primary, when Republican candidate Mitt Romney said that instead of mass deportations, he’d influence migrants to leave the US voluntarily, by cutting them out of the labor market with programs such as E-Verify. It seemed almost like a joke — but even back then, the American Immigration Council wrote that what Romney was really pushing for was “a plan pursued by extremist immigration-control organizations in Congress and state houses across the nation,” which it identified as “attrition through enforcement.”

At that time, the strategy already included state-level attempts to deny “education, transportation, and even basic services like water and housing to anyone who cannot prove legal immigration status.” After Romney lost to Barack Obama that November, a pre–White House Donald Trump called the Republican’s strategy “maniacal” and told Newsmax it had cost him the Latino vote: “He lost everybody who is inspired to come into this country.”

Given that on the campaign trail last year, Trump promised an immigration enforcement strategy similar to “Operation Wetback,” the 1950s campaign that deported about a million Mexicans and some Mexican Americans from the United States, the administration’s recent focus on self-deportation may seem like a pivot. But it’s actually part of a long tradition of anti-immigrant policy in the US and around the globe.

When immigration authorities arrived in Chicago a week after Trump’s inauguration to start carrying out a blitz on undocumented communities, TV personality Dr Phil joined them in the field. He even live streamed the operation on his social platform, alongside border czar Tom Homan, who has threatened to deport US citizen children alongside their undocumented families to avoid family separations.

The bizarre media spectacle has since been followed up with other surreal developments. On Valentine’s Day, the White House posted a card on social media that read: “Roses are red, Violets are blue, come here illegally and we’ll deport you.” It was followed up a few days later with an “ASMR” video of migrants being shackled and loaded onto a deportation flight. Authorities have also announced plans to create a registry of undocumented individuals ages fourteen and up.

Meanwhile, Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested high-profile Palestinian student activist Mahmoud Khalil, who is a green card holder. The measures are seemingly designed to terrorize migrant communities and leave them vulnerable, all amid reports that immigration authorities are actually not delivering the number of deportations Trump had hoped for, at the pace he expected.

In a 2019 article in the Harvard Law Review titled “Self-Deportation Nation,” University of California, Los Angeles Law’s K-Sue Park argued that the logic of self-deportation — which she defines as the strategy of “making life so unbearable” that those groups who are “unwanted as members of the American polity” decide to leave — forces individuals to choose between “voluntary departure” or submitting “to the vulnerability imposed on them.” She sees self-deportation campaigns as a driver of the “expansion of the grounds of deportability far beyond the possibility of actual enforcement. The widespread threats these developments create function to subordinate a population on which the nation relies heavily for labor.” She explains that, instead, “the policy works in the service of outcomes other than removal alone . . . subordination in the service of labor control.”

Park sees precedents for what she has termed the logic of self-deportation policies in various episodes throughout US history: the arrival of the first colonizers; laws written to force indigenous peoples from their lands; state-level efforts to marginalize newly freed black people; the Chinese Exclusion era; and the Mexican Repatriation movement of the 1930s.

The current White House policy of strongly encouraging self-deportation functions partly by encouraging xenophobia. The Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees all people in the United States equal protection under its laws, doesn’t provide protection against discrimination by private individuals. As Park explains, this allows the state not only to collaborate with municipalities, states, corporations, and more to “expand the capacity of the deportation system,” but to “[delegate] discrimination to private entities, who are best positioned to perform it because they interact with people in the register that the policy attacks — their everyday lives.”

There’s evidence of a link between a state’s anti-migrant rhetoric and the incidence of hate crimes and violence against migrants. One October 2024 study found that incidences of violence against migrants and LGBTQ communities increase as a result of online hate speech, with triggers including Trump’s 2016 campaign. Since the election in November, for example, a chapter of the white-supremacist hate group the Ku Klux Klan has passed out flyers in neighborhoods in Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee, Indiana, and other states, calling not just for migrants to leave immediately — but for their neighbors to help identify and report them, as well as join the Klan’s ranks. In the months before the election, false claims about Haitian migrants in Columbus, Ohio, by Trump, his vice-presidential candidate J. D. Vance, and others resulted in bomb threats and harassment, while in New York City, a parks worker was charged with a hate crime after he shot dead a thirty-year-old Venezuelan migrant.

Nonstate actors have, throughout the United States’ history, often been the foot soldiers of government discrimination campaigns. During the Great Depression, the “voluntary” repatriations of Mexicans were just one example. The federal government carried out few direct deportations. But anywhere from 300,000 to 2 million Mexicans and Mexican Americans are estimated to have left the US in that period. They left under pressure from local authorities who denied them access to lifesaving Depression relief or out of fear of forced deportation or harassment from their neighbors.

Historian Emiliano Aguilar of the University of Notre Dame has done extensive research on the repatriation movement. He sees in that episode many parallels with our current political moment. “The Mexican community was placed between two difficult decisions,” Aguilar told Jacobin. They could return to Mexico, or “they could remain, bereft of employment or any forms of community support, whether through community relief efforts or institutional support.”

“Today the Trump administration has crafted their own lose-lose solution for the undocumented community in the United States,” Aguilar explains. “Unfortunately, this will also entail varying levels of legislation meant to deprive undocumented communities of municipal services. . . . Just like the repatriation movement, the claim of voluntariness at play today is rhetoric to dispel the very real restrictionist, xenophobic, and inhumane actions under the guise of fixing a long unstable immigration policy. The GOP’s strategy: rhetoric over actual reform.”

The fear being drummed up by the administration’s immigration strategy is seeing results, as undocumented migrants work to avoid a surprise deportation that would upend their lives.

Daniela, who is currently thirty-three, is undocumented, even though she has been in the United States since she was two years old. But stuck at the crossroads of a broken system and the new pressures of the second Trump era, she’s now planning to move from the Southwest United States to Mexico, along with her US citizen husband — who she says has been steadfast in his support of her — and their four US-born daughters, though the girls speak no Spanish. The family even hopes to move to a community in Mexico that’s mostly populated by US Americans, as they all grew up in the United States. “I’ve gone to the Mexican consulates to get my passport, and that’s terrifying enough, because their Spanish is so different from mine; I’ve lost so much because I’ve lived in the US my whole life. It’s weird — I feel like I’m going to be a foreigner in the country of my birth,” she tells Jacobin.

“It’s a little terrifying. I feel like I need somebody to hold my hand when I get there, to tell me where to go. What do I do? How do I get a job? How do I get a license?”

“We had dabbled with the idea of moving to Mexico if we got to the point where there was no solution,” Daniela says. But the Trump administration’s rhetoric toward migrants has affected her. “It definitely has brought a lot of that fear to the forefront of my mind, when I’m driving or out and about, of being extra vigilant of who’s around and not calling attention to myself or doing something that might cause someone to ask, ‘Hey, let me see your ID.’”

“The overall sense of the country is hyper-vigilance. There was a fire marshal parked down the street, but he was in an all blacked-out truck, sitting there for a few hours facing toward our home. I just got really nervous. So my husband went and asked, can I help you with something?”

Even though Daniela’s father is a US citizen, she says because he never financially supported her as a child, she was unable to adjust her status on the basis of his parentage, though the family did a DNA test to confirm for authorities that she’s his daughter. Since marrying her husband, the couple have been working for ten years to adjust her status. Unlike some other childhood arrivals, Daniela did not apply for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, on the advice of a legal professional, who she says believed it was safer for her to pursue other options — advice subsequent legal counsel told her was a mistake.

“But we’ve stalled out on that because I have an illegal entry,” Daniela says, explaining that her US citizen father paid a coyote to bring her and her mother into the country. As a result, if Daniela and her family leave for Mexico, she likely won’t be able to attempt to reenter the country until the end of a ten-year bar.

“My entry was illegal, at the age of two. That’s my biggest complaint about the immigration system. There’s no age of consent or liability.” In order to attempt to get her green card, Daniela would have to go to Mexico for an interview. “There are hundreds and hundreds of people who go. . . . They leave their families, and then they never get to come back.”

“That’s the biggest reason we’re self-deporting. I have the control,” Daniela explains, in the hopes her husband will never have to explain to their daughters, “Well, mom’s gone, she’s in Mexico.”