Last December, the Department of Homeland Security released a statement saying that since President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January, his campaign against undocumented immigrants had reached record levels.
In that document, DHS said more than 2.5 million people had left the United States, including over 605,000 deportations and nearly 2 million individuals who chose to self-deport.
The program's uptake prompted the Trump administration to raise the incentive for self-deportation to $2,600, along with a free flight to migrants' home countries. However, an investigation by Milenio found that human rights advocates and immigration attorneys have warned of the potential risks of using the option, urging migrants not to rely on it because it is not a formal immigration benefit and does not guarantee the ability to return to the United States in the future. Media outlets have also documented cases of people who used the app but never received the assistance that was promised.
The Milenio report also noted that some self-deportations go uncounted because those who leave do not go through a formal legal process before returning to their countries. That was the case for Luis Valentan, a day laborer who spent 34 years living in the United States but decided in the summer of 2025 to return to Mexico with his family out of fear of being arrested and sent to immigration detention centers.
"It was very overwhelming and stressful. We weighed what options we had. I had already spoken with other lawyers and it was always the same: for those of us who entered the way they call it, illegally, there are no options," Valentan told Milenio.
As of December 2025, about 40,000 people had self-deported using the app, according to data reported by The New York Times. In September of last year, ProPublica obtained DHS data showing 25,000 registered departures of immigrants of all nationalities through the app, of which only about half received assistance returning to their home countries.
Even though many self-deportation cases are not officially counted, organizations that have spent more than a decade receiving returnees in Mexico point to what they describe as an evident trend in which forced returns are rising alongside increased enforcement against immigrant communities in the United States.
Despite the uncertainty of going back to Mexico and leaving behind a life built through decades of work and sacrifice in the United States, Valentan said his decision was driven less by fear and more by what he described as racial profiling.
"Many people ask me why I left, and I say it wasn't because of fear. More than anything, it was exhaustion from seeing, over the years I lived there, that our people exist between the hatred of Republicans and the pity of Democrats. And the exhaustion is [from] watching how they keep using our community as scapegoats," he said.
The numbers showing how many return are even less clear and much of this return migration remains largely invisible to governments. In 2025, Mexico recorded 160,192 repatriation events of Mexican nationals from the United States, a 22% decrease from 2024. But an unknown number of people do not appear in official reports because they do not pass through formal repatriation channels.
"There is no data on voluntary returns. People are going back out of fear of deportation, but who is counting them if they don't pass through a port of entry? If you don't have data, if you don't have a clear assessment, how can you design public policy if you don't even know the scope of the problem?" said Norma Mendieta, director of the Center for Assistance to Indigenous Migrant Families.
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