Hasta La Vista, Baby. Voluntary Deportation Requests Spike Under Trump
by R. Cort Kirkwood
TheNewAmerican.com
Friday, 10 May 2019
The illegal-alien juggernaut at the southwest border of the United States pushed nearly 110,000 Central Americans into the United States in April. The total for fiscal 2019 thus far now exceeds all of fiscal 2018.
But at least some illegals have received the strong message that they aren’t welcome here. And so they want to leave, or at least plan to leave. Illegal aliens, the Marshall Project reports, are applying in record numbers for “voluntary departure,” which means they are self-deporting.
In fiscal 2018, almost 30,000 border jumpers said they’re ready to pack up and head back home where they belong.
The Numbers
Voluntary departure, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, permits alien to leave the country officially without being deported. A deportation prohibits an illegal from returning to the country for five if not 10 years. Voluntary departure avoids that penalty, although “failure to depart within the time granted results in a fine and a ten-year bar to several forms of relief from deportation,” the agency’s website says.
“The number of immigrants who have applied for voluntary departure has soared since the election of Donald Trump,” the Marshall Project reported. Data it compiled from the Justice Department show that applications in fiscal 2018 doubled from the year before, “rising much faster than the 17 percent increase in overall immigration cases.”
Voluntary departure applications were 29,818, the Project noted, and they increased 50 percent in 2017. The peak month for applications was October, with 4,192.
The Marshall Project deduced that the increase demonstrates that the “Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration is having an impact: More people are considering leaving the U.S., rather than being stuck in detention or taking on a lengthy legal battle with little hope of success.”
Several factors are probably responsible for the surge in the number of applications for voluntary departure, experts say. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has increasingly gone after immigrants who have no criminal backgrounds — those who are more likely to qualify for voluntary departure. Because of the growing backlog of immigration cases, judges and Department of Homeland Security attorneys may feel pressured to resolve cases quickly and offer voluntary departure instead of dragging out multiple appeals.”
The Rest…HERE
