Since Donald Trump’s administration took office in January, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has promoted its efforts to push migrants to “self-deport.” Assistant secretary for the Department of Homeland Security Tricia McLaughlin told reporters early this month that the United States is now recording “sky-high levels of reverse migration,” even as official deportation numbers are reportedly lagging. Trump also recently floated the idea of offering migrants a stipend and a plane ticket if they voluntarily return to their countries of origin.
According to the League of United Latin American Citizens, a civil rights group, this upward trend in self-deportations is being driven by “increased legal threats, limited access to due process, and policies that make daily life unbearable.” The organization rejects the idea that self-deportation is a matter of free choice: “It’s a calculated policy goal. When fear replaces fair immigration reform, it becomes a form of forced exile.”
The United States has a long history of encouraging self-deportation, not only to expel migrants, but to push indigenous peoples from their land and ostracize black Americans. Trump’s tactics have echoes in US history, as well as historical parallels in the actions of foreign governments that have used the same strategies to manage internal populations.
But Trump’s actions are also part of a broader trend of hostility toward migrants and refugees globally, in which right-wing governments and movements have chosen to coerce immigrants to leave because of the unfeasibility of mass deportations.
Zeynep Şahin-Mencütek, a senior researcher at the Bonn International Centre for Conflict Studies, told Jacobin that the Trump administration’s efforts to encourage self-deportation “represent an extreme” example of xenophobic policies. We are, she said, witnessing “a global trend” in policies that favor the “coerced return of…
Auteur: Nyki Duda
