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Gone for now are the concentrated surges into American cities leading to dramatic — and sometimes deadly — clashes between immigration agents and protesters. Mass raids of Home Depot parking lots in search of undocumented day laborers are no longer routine. Immigration enforcement officials continue to deport nearly 1,000 people a day, many of them with no criminal record. But the Trump administration is also ramping up another strategy: to take apart immigrants’ lives, piece by piece, until they decide to leave the country altogether.
In February, the Department of Housing and Urban Development proposed a new federal rule blocking “mixed status” families from living in publicly subsidized housing, which could cause an estimated 80,000 people to lose their homes, including about 37,000 children, nearly all of them U.S. citizens. Starting in March, roughly 200,000 immigrants began losing their commercial driver’s licenses, under a new ban on truckers who are asylum seekers, refugees or undocumented immigrants who arrived as children. The Trump administration has reportedly weighed an order that would require banks to verify their customers’ citizenship status. Access to capital has already been curtailed. Starting last month, noncitizens can no longer obtain small business loans through the federal government, even if they are here legally.
Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s anti-immigration agenda, is lobbying Republican-led states to cut off services. In a meeting last month in Washington, he asked Texas lawmakers why they had not already passed a bill ending public education funding for undocumented children.
In this, the administration is learning a lesson familiar to past presidents of both parties: Millions of people without the right papers are deeply embedded in American society. Even with the world’s most expansive — and expanding — deportation apparatus, the United States does not have remotely enough bureaucratic bandwidth to remove immigrants en masse. And as the public turns against the administration’s most visible, aggressive methods, it’s no surprise it is resorting to another strategy.
Self-deportation is an idea with deep roots. Well before the United States established its first immigration court, the government systematically pressured people to leave by making their lives intolerable. But perhaps no president has made self-deportation such an explicit policy, or taken it to such extreme lengths, as Trump. The Department of Homeland Security regularly trumpets a standing offer to pay $2,600 to any immigrant who exits the country, more than double the sum being offered a year ago. “Home is just a few clicks away!” the department posted on X last month, while also offering a free flight to a home country.
As the Trump administration shifts its strategy away from audacious, citywide raids, it seeks to apply pressure at every point of contact between immigrants and the government, using the country’s vast bureaucracy. But the most important tool for encouraging self-deportation today is the same as it was more than a century ago: fear.
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