AM Dispatch: Trump’s ‘Self-Deportation’ Trap: Now They’re Arresting You for Leaving
Plus, work permits slashed, Afghans mass detained, NOLA terror campaign continues, massive ICE surge in Hawaii, another deportation flight to Iran, and more!
WASHINGTON — So here’s what passes for immigration enforcement in Trump’s America: The government told you to leave. Built a whole app so you could report your “intent to part.” Offered you a thousand bucks to get out. Called it self-deportation. Said if you’re here illegally, don’t wait for ICE to arrest you—leave on your own terms.
And now? Now they’re going to arrest you for leaving.
An ICE memo obtained by HuffPost reveals the administration is planning “Operation Irish Goodbye”—agents deployed to the US-Mexico border to catch migrants attempting to voluntarily return home during the holidays. The plan targets commercial buses passing through ports of entry into Mexico, arresting people “attempting to self-remove” after being in the US without legal authorization. Travelers with no immigration or criminal records who don’t pose a public safety risk would still be processed as “voluntary returns”—but others would be detained and face formal deportation proceedings.
The operation’s name references slipping out of a party without saying goodbye. The joke, apparently, is on anyone who believed the government when it said you could leave on your own initiative.
ICE’s own webpage on self-deportation still urges those without legal status to “leave on your own terms.” The government advises: “If you’re illegally present in the U.S., you don’t have to—and shouldn’t—wait for ICE officials to arrest you.”
Except now they’re waiting for you at the border.
Muzaffar Chishti at the Migration Policy Institute sees the game clearly: formal removal proceedings bar people from reentry for years or permanently, and make reentering a crime.
“Removal has consequences,” he said. But there’s another angle—Trump promised to deport people at unprecedented rates, and he’s failing. The administration said it’s on pace to deport nearly 600,000 people by the end of Trump’s first year—that would fall short of the 685,000 deportations the Biden administration recorded in fiscal year 2024.
Migrants who exit undetected through a land port don’t count in official removal statistics. But arrest them on a bus heading south, process them, and suddenly they’re a deportation Trump can brag about.
“They’re getting clearly desperate,” Chishti told HuffPost. “But you can’t get to scale by removing people who are already offering themselves to be removed, because that number has not been high.”
A duplicitous DHS spokesperson said the agency “does not confirm future operations,” then confirmed it by declaring the administration has “secured our borders and ports to ensure no illegal aliens are entering or leaving the U.S. without proper inspection.”
Leaving. Without proper inspection.