ICE Uses AI Santa to Push Self-Deportation Bonus, Christmas Spirit Optional

America’s immigration authorities have deployed artificial intelligence—and Santa Claus—in a new campaign to coax undocumented migrants to self-deport, raising awkward questions for New York’s communities and the ethical boundaries of official messaging.

On a recent morning, New Yorkers scrolling through X (formerly Twitter) were served an odd spectacle: a video of Santa Claus, dressed not in festive ermine but the crimson armoured vest of America’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), collaring migrants, entering them into a database, and packing them onto a plane marked “ICE Air.” The North Pole mythos met federal bureaucracy, courtesy of generative artificial intelligence wielded by ICE’s public affairs team. The message accompanying the digital tableau was equally unsubtle: “AVOID ICE AIR AND SANTA’S NAUGHTY LIST! Self-deport today… earn $3,000 and spend Christmas at home with loved ones.”

This push, under the Department of Homeland Security’s banner, anchors a campaign to coax irregular migrants to “self-deport”—in bureaucratic parlance, to leave under their own steam in exchange for a modest cash bonus. Under the campaign, any migrant who removes themselves via the CBP Home app can pocket $3,000 and a free ticket home. The government says this holiday offer is valid through the end of 2025, far outlasting the gingerbread season.

New York, home to more than 3 million foreign-born residents—about one-third of its population—sits at the epicentre of the country’s swirling immigration debate. While the programme is national, its ramifications are keenly felt in the five boroughs, which have witnessed both a spike in recent arrivals and mounting tensions over shelter, work, and public space. To ICE, the self-deportation gambit is elegant arithmetic. Processed through an app, each departure costs the treasury $3,000 plus airfare—a far cry from the $17,000 it estimates is required for a standard arrest, detention, and forced removal. The government, ever keen on savings, reckons the sums will add up.

For undocumented New Yorkers, the calculation is less simple. The siren song of a one-off cash payment and free passage “home” may appeal to those weary of insecurity or facing insurmountable bureaucratic hurdles. Yet for many others, $3,000 is paltry compensation for uprooting lives, abandoning jobs and schools, and braving uncertain futures in countries they once fled. The video’s pointedly festive framing—leaning on the kitsch of Christmas and childhood nostalgia—borders on the farcical, and risks trivialising wrenching personal decisions.

There is, too, the matter of taste. Employing a digitally generated Santa as the face of deportation—effectively gamifying forced remigration—raises eyebrows beyond the usual political camps. Even New York’s famously sardonic tabloids paused to scratch their heads, with one migrant-rights muralist declaring, “Los neoyorquinos no cederán ante el miedo”—New Yorkers will not give in to fear. Community groups, faith leaders, and some city politicians have denounced the “holiday incentive,” stressing its psychological toll and the potential for stoking confusion and anxiety among the city’s undocumented residents (and, one imagines, their children).

The federal authorities can counter, not without reason, that a voluntary departure process conserves resources, streamlines operations, and is, on paper, less traumatic than razing apartments in the dead of night. To date, ICE claims nearly 1.9 million migrants have opted for voluntary departure during this administration. The offer, however, sits awkwardly with a city that has made a point—sometimes to its fiscal pain—of welcoming newcomers, however fraught the legal pathways.

Officials in Washington, for their part, seem almost unembarrassed by the incongruity. Kristi Noem, Secretary of Homeland Security, has hailed the “casa para las fiestas” (home for the holidays) effort as both cost-saving and humane. The department argues that drastic action is needed, given Congress’s failure to pass comprehensive legislation and the gargantuan backlog of cases gumming up the courts. Technology, they believe, can lubricate the wheels—if not reconcile the contradictions—of American immigration enforcement.

New tools, old dilemmas

Viewed more widely, New York’s experience is a microcosm of a national drama. Across the country, cities both buoyant and struggling confront a surge of new arrivals. While New York has a vaunted if creaking infrastructure for integration, in smaller municipalities—some with far less generous safety nets—offers to pay migrants to leave might seem less bizarre, more pragmatic. Europe, for its part, has dabbled in similar inducements, sometimes to little effect: Germany’s “StarthilfePlus” paid rejected asylum seekers a one-off sum for voluntary return, with mixed results and not a little public debate.

The American experiment, however, now layers on artificial intelligence and digital spectacle—deploying the tools of influencers, not just bureaucrats. That may suit a country where political messaging has outstripped policy substance. Yet it also risks deepening cynicism toward governmental intent, especially in an era when trust in institutions is already fragile. Those with the most at stake—migrants on precarious legal ground—could find themselves further alienated, mistrustful of both state and city authorities.

For New York’s local government, caught between legal obligation (the city’s “sanctuary” status) and budgetary strains, the federal video lands somewhere between unwanted gift and snarky reproof. Already, shelters are overflowing, social services stretched, and the politics of immigration threaten to splinter the city’s famously hard-nosed but quietly empathetic polity. For Mayor Eric Adams and his administration, balancing compassion with fiscal discipline grows only trickier.

That ICE’s campaign has provoked such strong reaction is a testament to the peculiar place immigration holds in the city’s psyche. New Yorkers may delight in irony, but rarely when wielded by faceless authority. The episode portends more tension, not less, as debates over national boundaries, humanitarian obligation, and city identity persist.

In sum, offering cash and holiday platitudes in exchange for voluntary exodus is efficient, perhaps even necessary in the short term. But it is hard to imagine Santa—and his algorithmic elves—becoming the true ambassadors of American immigration. As federal and city governments grope for answers, New Yorkers will likely rely, as ever, on their own brand of sceptical optimism—and a willingness to look past both pablum and provocation in pursuit of something more lasting than seasonal cheer. ■