The Trump administration has unveiled an overhauled cellphone app once used to let migrants apply for asylum, turning it into a system that allows people living illegally in the U.S. to say they want to leave the country voluntarily.
The renamed app, announced Monday and now called CBP Home, is part of the administration’s campaign to encourage “self-deportations, ” touted as an easy and cost-effective way to nudge along President Donald Trump’s push to deport millions of immigrants without legal status.
“The app provides illegal aliens in the United States with a straightforward way to declare their intent to voluntarily depart, offering them the chance to leave before facing harsher consequences,” Pete Flores, the acting commissioner for U.S Customs and Border Protection, said in a statement.
Moments after Trump took office, the earlier version of the app, CBP One, stopped allowing migrants to apply for asylum, and tens of thousands of border appointments were canceled.
More than 900,000 people were allowed in the country on immigration parole under CBP One, generally for two years, starting in January 2023.
The Trump administration has repeatedly urged migrants in the country illegally to leave.
“The CBP Home app gives aliens the option to leave now and self deport, so they may still have the opportunity to return legally in the future and live the American dream,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said on the social platform X. “If they don’t, we will find them, we will deport them, and they will never return.”
Experts wondered how many people without legal status would register for what has long been known as “voluntary departure,” or what the government hopes to gain from the new app.
“I’m not sure what their intentions are,” said Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, associate policy analyst with the Migration Policy Institute. “But they’re creating a bit of a culture of fear around immigration right now,” from highly publicized ICE arrests to sending immigrants to a detention camp at Guantanamo Bay. The new app, she said, could be part of that “targeted public relations campaign” to urge more people to leave the U.S.
Some people living in the U.S. illegally chose to leave even before Trump’s inauguration, though it’s unclear how many.
But earlier mass crackdowns on illegal immigration — most famously a quasi-military operation in the mid-1950s that Trump has repeatedly praised — also drove many immigrants who were in the U.S. legally to leave.
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