Feds Triple Autodeportation Payout to $3,000 if Migrants Leave by End of 2025

America’s bold new “exit bonus” policy for undocumented migrants marks a dramatic turn in immigration management—with complex ripples for New York City.

In a city where more than one-third of residents were born outside America, few topics provoke such fevered discussion as immigration. Yet even jaded New Yorkers blinked at the novelty when, in late June, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced it was tripling its “bono de salida”—offering $3,000, up from $1,000, to those undocumented migrants who agree to leave the United States voluntarily before the end of 2025. Not only will they receive the cash, but also a government-funded one-way air ticket and exemption from fines and some civil penalties. Failure to seize the offer, according to Kristi Noem, the hard-charging Secretary of Homeland Security under President Trump’s resurgent Republican administration, will bring swift, presumably uncompromising enforcement.

The so-called “exit bonus” is the centrepiece of a new voluntary departure campaign, one repurposing Biden-era technology. The CBP One smartphone app, initially launched to streamline asylum procedures, now facilitates migrants declaring their intent to leave. Those approved are shielded from immediate Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrest—at least as long as they can show “significant steps” toward departure.

For New York City, where an estimated 560,000 people live undocumented, the implications are ominous and, some officials fear, destabilising. The swelling presence of new immigrants—over 180,000 arrivals, by City Hall’s count, since spring 2022—has already burdened municipal shelters, schools, and strained social tolerance. Now, a carrot-and-stick policy could accelerate population churn, sending hundreds if not thousands abroad overnight, further scrambling labour markets and social services.

Some city lawmakers, quick with statements and calculations, warn that the lure of $3,000 may compel desperate migrants to cut ties and go. Nearly a quarter of the city’s dishwashers, home health aides, and construction labourers are non-citizens, many living in the legal shadows. Abrupt departures could roil New York’s already rickety service sector, where even small fluctuations threaten wage inflation, business closures, or both.

City Hall is also left grasping for legal and practical clarity. The DHS says those showing progress towards departure will be left undisturbed, but has offered scant details on the practical meaning of “significant steps,” or how long this quasi-protection will really last. The lack of detailed guidance leaves crucial ambiguity for migrants and city service agencies alike. Meanwhile, advocacy groups fret that the spectre of imminent ICE sweeps—“arrested and never return,” as Ms Noem promised—will stoke another round of fear, discourage immigrant children from attending school, and send legal clinics scrambling.

The wider economic portents are similarly murky. While the federal government touts the plan as an austerity measure (each forced removal, ICE calculates, costs $17,000 versus a few thousand for this “exit bonus”), the cost savings may be modest alongside potential disruptions to local economies. In Manhattan restaurants and Bronx building sites, undocumented workers’ absence could exacerbate New York’s chronic staffing woes. The truism—“immigrants take jobs Americans spurn”—remains unrefuted by the data.

Further afield, New York’s response could be a harbinger for metros across America. Los Angeles, Houston, and Chicago, each with their own surging undocumented populations, will observe whether a bigger fiscal carrot lures out-migration, or whether threatened mass enforcement merely drives people further underground. Similar cash incentives for voluntary return have been mooted in the United Kingdom, Germany, and Australia—none with unalloyed success. Those who leave often face danger or penury back home, and re-entry bans—much brandished by the DHS—have rarely stemmed future migration entirely.

A city’s delicate social chemistry

New York’s democratic experiment has long turned assorted newcomers into neighbours. The city’s status as a sanctuary, enshrined in Mayor Adams’ executive orders and a web of local ordinances, now faces challenge from Washington’s sharper-edged approach. The offer of a generous payout for self-removal places local government in an uneasy position—not quite accomplice, not overtly adversary.

There exist pragmatic arguments for voluntary departure subsidies: they are cheaper, less traumatising, and avoid the legal quicksand of mass deportations. For some individuals, $3,000 and a clean record may be a reasonable deal—particularly for migrants whose asylum claims seem doomed under the newly restrictive federal standards. But the policy also smacks of an administrative sleight of hand: a way to slim official statistics while claiming a humane high ground, without solving underlying dysfunctions.

Whether the new programme empties municipal shelters or simply reshuffles hardship is anyone’s guess. The approach assumes that the majority of migrants will prefer a payout and free departure over the risks of hiding. Yet history suggests the calculus is more complex; for many, roots—family, community, hope of legalisation—run deeper than a onetime cash offer.

For now, city agencies, business owners, and exhausted social workers can only wait and watch. The administration reckons that shifting migrants “voluntarily” will placate nativist sentiment and lighten municipal budgets. But the real effect, as with much federal immigration theatre, may be to tangle New York yet tighter in its contradictions: a city founded by immigrants, thriving in their ambition, now handed another federal edict to execute or evade.

As Washington sharpens both its carrots and sticks, New York will once more find itself both stage and test case for national immigration drama. With characteristic sangfroid, the city will persevere—but we suspect the true impact of the exit bonus will only be tallied long after the last payout is made and the cold bureaucratic ledger is closed. ■