Self-deporters increase, but most illegals are staying.

Jesús, 25, arrived last year from Venezuela. Jimena Peck for The New York Times

It is incredibly hard to deport 14 million people — the estimated number of immigrants in the United States unlawfully. First, the government has to find them. For many, it has to pry them from their lives, their jobs, their communities. That’s why the Trump administration has deported only a few thousand migrants so far, focusing mostly on those it says are criminals.

To make a real change, as Trump has promised to do, millions of people would need to leave voluntarily. So the administration is urging them — in some cases, trying to scare them enough — to “self-deport.” The Homeland Security secretary tells them in TV ads to “leave now” or be hunted down. Those who comply “may have an opportunity to return and enjoy our freedom and live the American dream.” (This is unlikely, because anyone who has been in the country illegally for a year is ineligible to return for a decade.)

Self-deportation, a longtime fantasy for immigration hawks, was popularized by Mitt Romney in a 2012 presidential debate and often mocked. But for the first time in my 15 years of reporting on this topic, immigrants tell me they’re considering it. Some have already followed through. If the climate here becomes intolerable — if the risks of being caught and severed from their families seem too high — it’s possible many more migrants will abandon the United States. Today’s newsletter is about what I’ve heard in my reporting.
Who wants to go

Migrants in Denver, Colo., in 2023. Hyoung Chang/The Denver Post, via Getty Images


In recent years, Denver has absorbed 40,000 migrants — the most per capita of any city. Most of the newcomers are Venezuelans who fled their broken country. But the city is also home to many Latino immigrants who came long ago. I visited last week to take their temperature.

Most are not inclined to bolt. Two-thirds of undocumented immigrants have been in the country for a decade or longer. Most pay taxes. They’re people like Mirna, a Mexican who crossed the border 28 years ago. Her husband owns a house-painting business. They bought a mobile home and have three American children, including a daughter serving in the Navy. Mirna, who speaks English fluently, told me she wouldn’t go back to Mexico because it would mean leaving her kids.

But recent border crossers are much more likely to consider departing. I interviewed several young men from Venezuela who are among them. They see footage of shackled migrants shuffled onto deportation planes. They watch the videos of more than 200 Venezuelan men, accused by the Trump administration of gang affiliation, being flown to a mega-prison in El Salvador. Reporting suggests that some of them may not have been gang members.

Rather than risk subjecting themselves to that ordeal, they want to leave on their own terms.

Since arriving in Denver in 2023, Cristian, 29, has delivered meals and worked on construction sites. (Like other migrants I interviewed, he worried that immigration agents would find him and spoke on the condition that I identify him only by his given name.) He sends money to his wife and children in Venezuela. Cristian does not have any tattoos, a customary gang indicator, he said. He possesses a work permit and an active asylum application, which theoretically protects him from imminent deportation.

But the enforcement climate since Trump took office has changed Cristian’s calculus “360 degrees,” he told me. With the help of an American friend who escorted him to several immigration offices, he made an appointment to appear before a judge today so he could request a voluntary departure from the United States. (Immigrants who receive formal permission to leave have an easier time returning later.)

Other Venezuelans contemplating an exit were released into the United States by border officials with orders to report to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement every few months. Recently, officials have detained and deported people when they’ve shown up for their check-ins.

ICE agents and the local authorities detain a person in Denver. Chet Strange for The New York Times


Jesús, 25, has his next ICE appointment in early May and sees the writing on the wall. After arriving last year, he languished for months in detention until officials turned him loose, probably to make room for others. He found work remodeling homes in Denver. Now he’d rather return voluntarily to Venezuela than be confined again. “I came here to work to help my family,” said Jesús, the sole brother to five sisters. “I just hope to manage to leave before they deport me.”

He has enough money to buy an airline ticket. But, like others, he told me that the U.S. authorities had confiscated his passport. How can he board a plane without it?

American women in Denver formed groups in late 2023 to help recent arrivals from Venezuela. But more recently they also share tips about how to leave because the bureaucracy can be hard to navigate. A mother with a U.S.-born child needs to get a passport for her child, for instance. But his father, who needs to sign forms, has been deported. The local volunteers have researched what happens if migrants leave without an ID — and whether it’s safer to depart by air or over land.

The departures are not exclusive to Denver. A family in Chicago recently left for Mexico, according to their lawyer. People have abandoned Springfield, Ohio — the town where Trump claimed Haitians were eating their pets — employers there told me. Others are contemplating leaving from elsewhere, like Houston.
The right moment

For now, most migrants are staying put. They’ve trekked through jungles and cartel territory to get here. Instead of giving up, they limit their outings and keep a low profile.

What could change their minds? The job market, several told me. A crackdown on U.S. businesses that employed undocumented workers would drive many into the shadows and others back home. A recession would have the same effect. Wayne Cornelius, an immigration scholar at the University of California, San Diego, has found that bleak job prospects are most likely to impel undocumented immigrants to leave.

Take Karla and Ender, a Venezuelan couple with four children. They worry about immigration enforcement. But they have plenty of work, and their family is thriving in Colorado. Since arriving in late 2023, they have relocated from a rundown apartment complex, acquired two cars and bought their kids cellphones.

“You can barely make enough money to feed your family in Venezuela,” Karla said. “We live much better here.”

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Teams of masked agents in masks have approached foreign students, zip-tied them and bundled them into unmarked vehicles. These tactics are usually reserved for criminal suspects.

Migrant Caravan: Thousands Move Into Guatemala, Hoping To Reach U.S.

 

NPR

JASON BEAUBIEN

A Honduran migrant woman carries a child on her back as they travel with other migrants by foot along a highway in Chiquimula, Guatemala, on Saturday, in hopes of reaching the U.S. border.

Sandra Sebastian/AP

Guatemala security forces are attempting to block thousands of Honduran migrants from heading north towards Mexico and the U.S. border.

On Sunday, police and soldiers in riot gear confronted a caravan of migrants from Honduras on a highway near Chiquimula in southeastern Guatemala. After a tense standoff, in which police fired tear gas and attempted to beat back the migrants with batons, the surging crowd broke through a phalanx of soldiers.

Guillermo Díaz, Guatemala's top immigration official, says that since Friday 7,000-8,000 Hondurans have crossed in to Guatemala in an "irregular" manner.

"We are very concerned about this situation," Díaz says in a video on his department's Facebook page. "These people who've formed this caravan or are forming into a caravan...is a very difficult situation to manage." Guatemala has set up checkpoints on main roads leading to and from the Honduran border. However, Díaz says many of the migrants have left the main roads and are now arriving in towns in the middle of the country. Officials are very worried, he adds, because another group of roughly the same size is on its way.

"We hope this situation stops," he says. "And this flow of migrants ends."

Mexican authorities praised the Guatemalan government's forceful response to the migrants. Mexico has beefed up security on its own southern border with Guatemala in anticipation of the caravan. Mexico also sent six buses south to help transport Hondurans back to their home country. The Mexican Secretary for Foreign Affairs issued a statement calling on Honduran officials to do more to stop the "irregular flow" of citizens through the region.

But migrants in the caravan say they have little choice but to march north.

"We don't want to live in Honduras anymore," Ana Murillo told the French news agency Agence France-Presse. Standing with a group of migrants beside a busy road in southern Guatemala, she says Hondurans have been badly affected by hurricanes Eta and Iota, which slammed into the country in November. Honduras also suffers from incredibly high rates of violent crime and the pandemic has crippled the economy.

"There isn't any work. There are no opportunities," she says. A light blue cloth face mask hangs from her chin, several bags and children are at her feet. "We are leaving because we don't want to suffer further."

Honduran migrants clash with Guatemalan soldiers in Vado Hondo, Guatemala, on Sunday.

Sandra Sebastian/AP

Another migrant, Miguel Angel, tells AFP he's heading north now because he believes U.S. immigration policy will change once Joe Biden takes office as president.

"I have hope and faith in God, and in the good person that the United States has chosen," he says.

"Biden is a good person and isn't the same as the administration that's just ended."

But his chances of making it to the U.S./Mexico border are far less than they were a few years ago. In October 2020, another caravan of Hondurans dispersed before it got across Guatemala, and Guatemalan officials said they sent more than 3,000 Hondurans home from that group.

In 2019, Mexico deployed National Guard troops to its southern border to deter Central Americans from trying to cross.

Ariel Ruiz Soto, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., says he doesn't think it's likely that many of the Hondurans in this current caravan will make it all the way to the U.S. frontier. "I suspect that if this caravan actually made it to the Guatemalan/Mexico border that there would be even the heavier presence of (Mexican) National Guard to try to detain the migrants," he says. "We saw this again in October. That caravan really stopped in Guatemala at that time. So I don't foresee them getting to the U.S./Mexico border in large numbers."

Before the pandemic, nationals from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua were able to travel freely across each other's borders. Officials now are requiring a negative coronavirus test to cross. Some migrant advocates say this requirement is being used to block some refugees from seeking asylum abroad.

Honduran migrants, part of a caravan heading to the United States, stand in front of a police cordon in Vado Hondo, Guatemala on Sunday.

Johan Ordonez/AFP via Getty Images

Tom Jawetz, vice president of immigration policy at the Center for American Progress, agrees with Ruiz that this current caravan is unlikely to turn into a crisis for the Biden administration during its first few weeks in office.

"In 2018, in advance of the election there were a lot people holding their breath about caravans that dissipated long before they ever came close to the United States border," Jawetz says.

Despite that, he says the incoming Biden team can't ignore immigration and the immigration policies of the outgoing Trump administration for long.

"A number of the steps that were taken by the last administration to try to deter people from coming to the country where not only illegal, but unconscionable," he says.

Humans have been migrating since prehistoric times. Migration isn't going to stop. Even if this caravan doesn't make it to the U.S. border, other migrants are already there waiting. Some other potential migrants may view the change in administration in Washington as an opportunity to try to enter.

"Even if that were the case, to what ends would you go in order to head that off?" Jawetz asks. "Would you have them violate U.S. law, international law, and prevent people from requesting asylum at the border? Would you have them take their children away in order to send fear into the hearts of families throughout the region?"

Soon after he takes office, Biden is going to have to face the big questions around what Jawetz calls the U.S.'s "broken" immigration system.