Illegal immigrants who register with the government to self-deport and who go by the end of the year will get a $3,000 payment from Uncle Sam — triple the usual rate — the Department of Homeland Security said Monday.
The so-called “holiday stipend” is in addition to getting a free flight home.
Secretary Kristi Noem said it’s a particularly sweet carrot, and a better offer than the stick — deportation — that the government has made clear it’s also willing to use on rank-and-file illegal immigrants.
“Illegal aliens should take advantage of this gift and self-deport because if they don’t, we will find them, we will arrest them, and they will never return,” she said in announcing the bonus.
The department called it a “limited time offer” and “the best gift that an illegal alien can give themselves and their families this holiday season.”
DHS announced the bounty with a slick press release that replicated a Christmas advertisement. It showed a decorated Christmas tree in a cozy home, with a snowy landscape outside.
“Until the end of the year, take advantage of a $3,000 bonus to head home for the holidays!” the ad reads.
It even includes some fine print: “We’re checking names off our naughty list. Don’t be the next name we find.”
The year-end push comes as the department is trying to bolster its final 2025 numbers, hoping to impress President Trump, who’d promised his voters “mass deportations.”
The concrete numbers have fallen short of the White House’s hopes of 1 million formal arrests and ousters.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will end 2025 with fewer than half a million formal removals. That would still be an all-time record, and if ICE is able to carry December’s pace of more than 1,350 a day into 2026, next year will be even higher.
DHS says “tens of thousands” of migrants have also self-deported using the registration app, CBP Home, which pays out the bonus.
They are part of a broader count of 1.9 million people whom Ms. Noem says have self-deported. That tally has been questioned by those on all sides of the immigration issue, who say they cannot reproduce DHS’s calculations.
