The Trump administration has found a new way to pressure undocumented immigrants to leave the country. It is penalizing some of them with fines of nearly $1,000 a day for every day they stay in the country illegally.
So far, the administration has imposed $2 billion in fines on nearly 7,000 people who have failed to leave the country after either being ordered to do so or saying they would voluntarily go, according to Tricia McLaughlin, a homeland security spokeswoman.
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Officials have also encouraged migrants to leave the country voluntarily by offering them free flights and $1,000 stipends. This week, dozens of migrants leaving the country voluntarily were flown to Colombia and Honduras.
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It’s unclear whether the government has collected on any of the fines, but officials said that they could garnish wages, issue liens against property or refer people to private collection agencies to enforce the fines levied against them.
Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, said the fines are “yet another aspect of a multifaceted pressure campaign.”
She continued: “This is clearly a strategy to make conditions so inhospitable that noncitizens end up leaving.”
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