STORY: The 90,000 Voluntary Departures — The Silent Exile of Immigrants Under Pressure from Trump

Maxime Marquette

2026-06-24 13:09:41

Tom Homan and the Strategy of Exhaustion

Tom Homan, the White House border coordinator, explicitly articulated the strategy: “We knew that if we deployed unlimited ICE resources inland and carried out these operations, it would force those who are here illegally to leave on their own,” he said, according to an analysis by the Los Angeles Times published on June 12, 2026. The goal is not merely physical deportation—it is psychological and economic surrender.

This strategy was implemented on all fronts simultaneously: barring immigrants without permanent status from accessing small business loans guaranteed by the federal government; revoking work permits; halting the processing of green card applications; prohibiting entry or visa processing for nationals of 75 countries; and freezing pending cases for individuals from 39 countries already present in the country. It is a bureaucratic spider web designed to stifle without leaving any visible traces.

David Bier and the “sledgehammer” attack on the legal system

David Bier, an analyst at the Cato Institute—a libertarian organization, not a bastion of the left—summed up the situation with surgical precision in the pages of the Los Angeles Times: “The priority is to force people to leave the country or prevent them from coming, regardless of legal status or any other criteria. They’re taking a jackhammer to the system.” This testimony is crucial: it comes from an economist who usually advocates for immigration as a driver of economic growth.

Bier also pointed out that Trump’s visa policies affect half of all legal immigrants arriving from abroad, and that the sharpest declines have been seen among international students, highly skilled workers, and refugees. In other words, it is not just undocumented immigration that is being targeted—it is immigration itself.

When a think tank like the Cato Institute, founded on free-market principles, describes a Republican administration’s policy as a “blunt-force attack” on legal immigration, it’s time to take notice. This is no longer about border security—it’s a cultural war against American diversity itself.

The 90,000 Faces of Forced Departure — Who Leaves and Why

Detentions as a Means of Coercion

In an investigation published on May 30, 2026, The Marshall Project documented the conditions at the Delaney Hall detention center in Newark, New Jersey: spoiled and expired food, sometimes infested with live worms; inadequate medical care; unsanitary living quarters; and what detainees described as the systematic use of solitary confinement as a tool of coercion to pressure them into agreeing to voluntary departure. According to the Arizona Daily Star, as cited by the Marshall Project, a guard reportedly told a detainee: “It’s my job. I have to make your life miserable so that you’ll ask to be deported yourself.”

Among the cases documented by the Marshall Project were an openly gay Russian man, an Afghan with ties to the former U.S.-backed government, and an Iranian dissident—all facing a potentially fatal return to their home countries. DHS and the private company CoreCivic have denied any form of coercion. But the testimonies—consistent and repeated across multiple detention centers nationwide—paint a coherent picture.

Death as a Statistical Data Point

The context in which these voluntary departures are taking place is one of unprecedented mortality in detention. CNN reported in early June 2026 that nearly 50 people have died in ICE custody since Trump returned to power, making 2025 the deadliest year in at least two decades in ICE custody, with 2026 on track to be even worse. The Associated Press added that at least 10 ICE detainees had committed suicide since January 2025—even though ICE typically recorded zero or one suicide per year throughout its 23-year history.

Faced with this reality, agreeing to voluntary departure—even if it means paying for one’s own ticket and giving up years of legal proceedings—may seem like the only reasonably safe option. This is precisely the calculation the administration is counting on detainees to make.

Ten suicides in less than eighteen months, in centers where historically there had been none. This single statistic speaks volumes about the brutality of the system. These people are not “leaving voluntarily”—they are capitulating in the face of methodical institutional violence.

Raquel Molina — thirty years at Logan Airport, a green card, and then nothing

A Cleaning Lady and Her Vanishing Rights

Raquel Molina, a 65-year-old Salvadoran immigrant, spent her days scrubbing toilets and vacuuming airplane seats at Boston’s Logan International Airport for nearly thirty years. She had a valid Social Security number. She was authorized to work. Her pay: $19.75 an hour. Last summer, her supervisor told her she was no longer allowed access to the airport’s secure areas—and she was fired, along with dozens of other immigrant coworkers who had been working legally at Logan for years.

The Trump administration had decided that Temporary Protected Status (TPS)—the humanitarian visa under which Molina had been living legally for decades—no longer constituted a form of “authorization to reside,” according to Justin Long, a spokesperson for Customs and Border Protection, as quoted by the Boston Globe in its May 30, 2026, investigation. In practical terms: Molina could no longer be considered an authorized resident, and therefore could no longer receive the government clearances necessary to enter secure areas. “I didn’t understand what was happening,” she said. “I had worked hard. This news left me in a state of shock.”

A Snowballing Logic of Exclusion

Molina’s case illustrates the systemic logic described by the Boston Globe: the administration has not only tightened the conditions for undocumented immigrants—it has gradually downgraded the legal status of millions of immigrants who previously had the right to work. TPS holders, DACA recipients, and asylum seekers awaiting a decision—all are seeing their protections reinterpreted, eroded, or revoked by administrative memoranda.

Gabriel and Ana Lorenzo, undocumented immigrants in the United States, have four daughters who were born in the U.S. They had been paying taxes for years. With the elimination of the child tax credit for parents without legal status, their tax refund dropped from $3,500 last year to $302 this year, according to tax documents shared with The New York Times and reported by The Boston Globe. Ana Lorenzo had to return to work as a cleaner sooner than her doctors recommended after a hysterectomy—because she lacked the resources to pay the rent.

There is something obscene about taking away the child tax credit from parents of American children. These little girls are citizens of the United States. Their right to economic security should not be contingent on their parents’ immigration status. This is a collective punishment inflicted on children who have done nothing wrong.

The Ideology Behind the Mechanics — “Re-migration” to the White House

A Secret Office to Organize Exile

On June 15, 2026, The Guardian revealed that within the U.S. State Department, there is a “remigration office” — a unit dedicated to promoting the ideology of “remigration,” a term originating from the European white nationalist movement that refers to the goal of making living conditions so harsh for immigrants that they leave of their own accord to return to their countries of origin. The Department of Homeland Security reportedly even posted explicit support for this initiative on X, writing: “Re-migration has never been higher or clearer.”

This ideology, imported from European identitarian circles—notably the Austrian FPÖ movement and its counterparts in France and Germany—is now accepted at the highest levels of the U.S. executive branch. Stephen Miller, Trump’s senior advisor, laid out the conceptual foundations in a post on X last year: “On a large scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions and terrors of their broken homelands,” he wrote, according to the Boston Globe. The rhetoric is that of cultural contamination. It is ethnic nationalism, articulated as public policy.

The Bureaucratic Normalization of a Radical Ideology

What is striking about the rise of re-migration as a state doctrine is its quiet bureaucratic implementation. No dramatic legislation, no debate in Congress—just a series of memoranda, administrative revisions, and regulations published on a Friday afternoon to avoid weekend headlines. On May 22, 2026, USCIS issued a memorandum requiring the majority of foreign nationals applying for a green card to return to their country of origin to complete the process, except in “extraordinary circumstances.” This could affect hundreds of thousands of people whose applications are pending, according to El País.

The Cato Institute noted that this group includes approximately 1.2 million immigrants with pending applications for permanent residence, many of whom would be forced to “self-deport” in order to continue the process. For nationals of the 75 countries subject to visa bans, there is not even a way out: returning home to continue the process would simply mean returning home for good.

“Remigration” is the term for what I am observing with dismay: the deliberate attempt to strip the United States of its diversity by using the state’s bureaucratic apparatus—without a vote, without debate, and without transparency. It is a cultural revolution by executive order—and it is succeeding.

The Cubans — betrayed by those they helped elect

May Díaz, Camagüey, Houston, Miami — and Constant Fear

May Díaz is thirty-six years old. She was born in Camagüey, Cuba. On July 11, 2021, she took part in the historic protests against the Cuban communist regime, was beaten with batons by the police, and left her country three months later. She entered the United States on October 13, 2021, along with about fifteen other migrants, in the Mexicali area. Under different historical circumstances, a Cuban woman fleeing communism would have been welcomed with open arms. But times had changed. In March of this year, ICE agents knocked on the door of her apartment in Houston. She wasn’t there. She packed her belongings and moved to Miami. According to a June 14, 2026, article in The Guardian, she has since been living in constant fear of a knock on the door.

Her case illustrates a heart-wrenching political irony: approximately 68% of Cuban-American voters in Florida voted for Trump in the 2024 election—the highest level of support for Trump among any Hispanic group, according to The Guardian. It is precisely these communities that brought Trump to power in the hope of a tougher foreign policy toward Havana—and who now find themselves fleeing ICE agents on the streets of Miami, which has become the nation’s leading city for deportations since the beginning of 2026.

Eight thousand Cubans deported—more than in four years of his first term

The numbers are stark: since Trump returned to the presidency, nearly 8,000 Cubans have been deported from the United States, according to ICE statistics cited by The Guardian—more than double the 3,385 deported during Trump’s entire first term from 2017 to 2021. Human Rights Watch has documented that among those deported are elderly people with serious health problems who have lived in the United States for years.

Some are being sent back to a Cuba facing imminent U.S. military threats and a strict naval embargo—“a country to which they are being sent as hostages,” according to an HRW researcher. The geopolitical irony is cruel: Marco Rubio, a Miami-born Secretary of State to Cuban parents, is reportedly, according to The Guardian, the chief architect of a policy that punishes Cubans to better serve his 2028 presidential ambitions—by promoting regime change in Havana. Cubans are being held hostage by a foreign policy logic that uses them as pawns.

Cuban-Americans voted overwhelmingly for Trump because of his anti-communist stance. They now find themselves fleeing ICE in Miami. I understand the distress of these communities—but this is also proof that voting out of fear of communism does not protect against the brutality of a repressive state that has shifted its target.

Negative migration—an unprecedented historical reversal since the Great Depression

Brookings: More People Are Leaving the United States Than Are Arriving

In January 2026, the Brookings Institution published an estimate that came as a bombshell: in 2025, the United States recorded negative net migration for the first time in at least fifty years—meaning that more people left the country than arrived. The estimated range is between -10,000 and -295,000 people, with a central estimate of approximately -150,000, according to the Wall Street Journal. The last time this phenomenon occurred was during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Economists Edelberg, Veuger, and Watson, authors of the Brookings report, point out that this reversal is primarily due to a drop in new arrivals—suspension of refugee programs, visa restrictions, and the effective closure of borders—combined with an increase in deportations and voluntary departures. For 2026, their projections are even bleaker: net migration could reach -925,000 people, according to the high-scenario estimate. This represents a demographic transformation of historic proportions.

The Economic Consequences of an Ideological Choice

The U.S. Census Bureau had recorded international migration of 2.7 million people to the United States in 2024. In 2025, that figure fell to 1.3 million—a drop of more than half in a single year, according to Census Bureau data. The Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute—two pro-market think tanks—have both concluded that this decline in migration constitutes a structural economic weakness that is not linked to the business cycle but directly to immigration policy.

David Bier of the Cato Institute put it another way: Trump reduced legal immigration more than he did illegal immigration. The sharpest declines occurred in visas for international students, skilled workers, and refugees—precisely the categories that fuel the U.S. knowledge economy. Tech companies, universities, hospitals—all are beginning to feel the effects.

America built its global dominance on its ability to attract talent from around the world. It is now sending that talent back home, out of cultural fear and electoral calculation. This may be the greatest act of economic self-sabotage in its modern history.

Armin — a PhD, a research grant, and $15,000 in debt

The Trap of Administrative Freeze

Armin is forty-two years old. He came to the United States from Iran in 2019 on a student visa. He earned a Ph.D. In November 2025, he received a research grant that would finally allow him to work as a research associate at an American university. But the processing of his work permit has been administratively frozen since December—without explanation and with no immediate recourse. His university told him it could not hire him without this permit. In February 2026, he was turned down for another position. Since then, he has accumulated more than $15,000 in debt, according to the Los Angeles Times on June 12, 2026.

“I can’t believe it,” he said. “I’m doing research that benefits the national interest. You’d expect support from the government. Unfortunately, they don’t make any distinctions. They don’t look at your resume.” His green card application—filed under a provision allowing highly skilled immigrants to apply without employer sponsorship—is also on indefinite hold, stuck in the same administrative freeze as tens of thousands of other applications.

The Silent Purge of Foreign Brainpower

Armin’s story is not an isolated one. The administration has halted the processing of immigration applications for nationals of 39 countries already present on U.S. soil—a measure that particularly affects engineers, researchers, and doctors from India, Iran, Nigeria, and Mexico. At the same time, visas for new entrants from 75 countries have been suspended. David Bier estimated that these measures affect half of all legal immigrants arriving from abroad.

Universities such as MIT, Stanford, and Harvard have begun receiving reports from foreign professors and postdoctoral researchers who are unable to renew their work permits or are stranded abroad with no way to return to campus. U.S. scientific competitiveness—which relies heavily on foreign talent—is beginning to suffer from a silent but persistent brain drain.

A man who spent seven years studying in the United States, earned a Ph.D., received a national fellowship—and now finds himself $15,000 in debt because a bureaucrat blocked his application for no apparent reason. This isn’t immigration policy. It’s human waste orchestrated by the government.

Project Homecoming — State-Funded Eviction with a Smile

A $60 bonus to leave the U.S.

Since the spring of 2026, the Trump administration has launched what it calls Project Homecoming: a program that offers undocumented immigrants a free flight to their country of origin and a cash bonus—initially $2,600 via the CBP Home app, then $1,000 for the first charter flights organized from Houston in early June 2026. Sixty-four people took the first charter flight on June 2: 38 to Honduras and 26 to Colombia, according to DHS data reported by KRGV.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem summed up the proposal with a bluntness bordering on a threat: “If you are here illegally, use the CBP Home app to arrange your departure and receive financial support to return home. If you do not, you will face fines, arrest, deportation, and you will never be allowed to return.” The choice between leaving voluntarily with $1,000 or being forcibly deported to the Congo or Rwanda—third countries used as deportation hubs—is presented as a free choice.

The Fear Grant

Immigration lawyers immediately challenged the legality and ethics of the program. According to The Marshall Project, the financial incentives run counter to current law and judicial practices: an immigrant who accepts the program is supposed to have no active deportation order, but the actual conditions and long-term legal consequences are presented in a misleading manner. Conchita Cruz, executive director of the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project, warned: “We fear this is a pretext to remove people from the asylum system and the labor market.”

Furthermore, Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies—an organization that nonetheless supports immigration restrictions—has himself downplayed the official DHS figures: according to him, the 2.2 million “self-deportations” claimed by the administration are greatly exaggerated, and departures via the CBP Home app actually represent only a few thousand people. Statistical propaganda is part of the strategy.

Offering someone $1,000 to leave a country where they have lived for ten years, where their children attend school, and where they have built a life—while holding out as an alternative a detention cell infested with vermin or deportation to the Congo—is not generosity. It is coercion disguised as a subsidy.

Detention centers — hell as a persuasive argument

Delaney Hall, Newark: Vermin, Hunger Strikes, and Pepper Spray

The Delaney Hall detention center in Newark, New Jersey, has become one of the most widely documented symbols of Trump’s detention policy. In May 2026, detainees launched a hunger strike to protest the conditions: spoiled and expired food containing live worms, lack of medical care, and inhumane treatment. Rights groups organized protests outside the center. Federal agents responded by firing pepper spray and rubber bullets at the protesters—including, according to The Marshall Project, at Senator Andy Kim, who was struck by projectiles on the sidelines of the protest.

DHS denied that any hunger strike was taking place on social media. Tom Homan stated that the strikers would be force-fed “if it gets worse.” DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin claimed that it was just “a few individuals” who wanted their “usual ethnic food”—and that they could “go home and eat whatever they wanted.” Meanwhile, California Attorney General Rob Bonta described conditions at the Adelanto facility in Southern California as “cruel, inhumane, and unacceptable,” after detainees reported being given only beans and bread, enduring freezing temperatures, and facing a shortage of toilets.

A system cracking at the seams under pressure

Detention center capacity is under extreme strain: facilities across the country held approximately 60,000 people in April 2026, down from more than 70,000 in January—a slight decrease that reflects an acceleration in departures, whether voluntary or forced, rather than a relaxation of policy. ICE was making about 1,000 arrests per day in early March, according to TRAC, down from a peak of about 1,400 per day in mid-January.

Congress has just approved an additional $70 billion in funding for DHS, including $30 billion for ICE and nearly $20 billion for the Border Patrol—a “blank check,” according to an AP report on June 5, 2026, signed into a 12-page law with no conditions or safeguards, funding ICE operations through 2029. The White House’s official goal remains to deport one million people per year—a goal that has not yet been met, which explains the constant intensification of pressure.

Seventy billion dollars to deport people. I sometimes think about what that money could have done instead—schools, hospitals, research. But for the Trump administration, exclusion isn’t a cost: it’s the goal itself. And Congress has signed a blank check to fund it through 2029.

Minnesota, Florida, California — the America of states that are holding out

Judges Who Defy Washington

In the face of federal policy, judicial resistance is mounting. Several appellate courts have challenged the constitutionality of the Trump rule that bars immigrants who entered the country illegally from applying for bail—a measure that forces them to remain in detention throughout their proceedings, sometimes for months. Twenty states and the District of Columbia had already sued the federal government over access to federally funded community clinics, securing a temporary stay of the exclusion measures.

In Minnesota, Axios data from June 1, 2026, shows that the Fort Snelling Immigration Court saw its asylum approval rate drop from 13% under Biden to less than 2% under Trump. Since Trump’s reelection, nearly 2,200 asylum seekers have withdrawn their claims, compared to about 900 during Biden’s four years in office. These withdrawals are not voluntary waivers—they reflect the collapse of hope in a system that has ceased to function.

Sanctuary Cities Under Financial Pressure

Los Angeles, Chicago, New York—the “sanctuary cities” that had refused to cooperate with ICE are now facing increasing financial pressure from Washington, which has threatened to cut off their federal funding. In California, state attorneys general are issuing a growing number of reports on detention conditions, but they cannot physically prevent deportations. Local resistance is real but structurally limited in the face of federal power.

In Pennsylvania counties that host ICE detention centers—such as Clearfield County, home to the Moshannon Valley center—local elected officials are exploring their contractual leverage. Commissioner Dave Glass stated, “There’s no reason we can’t attach conditions to it,” referring to the renewal of the contract with ICE scheduled for September 2026. These county-level battles against a federal agency illustrate the asymmetry of the fight.

I look at the states and cities that are resisting, and I see something important: American federalism can still serve as a shield. But it’s a shield with holes—and $70 billion in federal funding for ICE exerts a lot of pressure to convince recalcitrant states to give in.

The Economic Cost of Forced Exile — What America Loses

A Dwindling Workforce in Strategic Sectors

The Trump administration claims that strict immigration policies benefit American workers by reducing competition in the labor market. The reality documented by economists is more nuanced: in the construction, agriculture, restaurant, and personal care sectors—industries with a high proportion of immigrants—the data show a growing labor shortage, not an improvement in wages or working conditions for native-born workers.

Both the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute have concluded that the decline in immigration is now a “normal structural weakness” of the U.S. economy, independent of the economic cycle. International migration had fallen from 2.7 million in 2024 to 1.3 million in 2025—a 52% drop—and projections for 2026 indicate that this decline will continue. This shift automatically reduces the United States’ long-term growth potential.

U.S. Universities and the Threat to Innovation

U.S. universities rely on international students—who pay tuition fees two to three times higher than those of U.S. residents—to fund a significant portion of their budgets. In 2025, international student enrollment fell for the first time in decades at many institutions. Research campuses are seeing foreign postdocs and researchers leave because they can no longer renew their work permits.

Silicon Valley—where the majority of startups founded between 2010 and 2020 were started by at least one immigrant or the child of an immigrant—is beginning to see some companies consider moving teams to Canada, Germany, or Australia to circumvent U.S. restrictions on work visas. It is a slow exodus, difficult to quantify in the short term, but whose impact on competitiveness will be felt in ten years.

Trump has declared his intention to “make America great again.” But driving out the best and brightest, blocking student visas, and forcing researchers to go into debt just to stay in the country that granted them a Ph.D.—that is exactly the opposite of what made America great. American greatness has always been built on the importation of talent and ambition.

The West Facing Its Mirror — What the American Exodus Says About the World

A Rift in the Democratic Model

The silent exile of the 90,000—and the millions who preceded or accompanied it in other forms—is not merely an American humanitarian tragedy. It is a political signal to the entire Western world. For decades, the United States has been the model of a liberal democracy capable of harnessing diversity as a productive force. This model is now being dismantled from within—not by external enemies, but by a democratically elected administration that is using the tools of the rule of law to undermine its own founding values.

European foreign ministries are watching these developments with a mixture of concern and unease: concern because the rise of identity-based parties in Europe—which use precisely the same rhetoric of “re-migration”—is being reinforced by the American example; unease because several European governments have themselves adopted restrictive immigration policies. The line between a firm immigration policy and a program of systematic exclusion is a fine one, and the United States serves as a real-world testing ground for it.

Trump: A Necessary Evil or an Irreversible Break

I believe in the strategic necessity of a strong and united America in the face of China, Russia, and Iran. I understand the argument that Trump embodies a kind of firmness that his predecessors failed to maintain on economic and security issues. But firmness at the border does not mean deliberately making life miserable for 90,000 people, many of whom have legal rights, American children, and decades of work in this country.

The forced exile of tens of thousands of people—the indebted Iranian engineer, the 65-year-old Salvadoran cleaning woman, the young Cuban woman fleeing communism who now finds herself fleeing ICE, the families of American children impoverished by tax cuts—is a real and reprehensible human cost. Defending the West does not mean treating some of its residents as enemies to be deported. The greatness of the West lies precisely in its ability to be better than its adversaries.

I’m not making these stories up. I’ve read them in the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, the Guardian, and the Marshall Project. They are documented, dated, and verified. What keeps me awake at night isn’t immigration—it’s the certainty that we’re normalizing a brutality that, just ten years ago, would have shocked the entire political spectrum. We must call it what it is.

Conclusion: Exile is not an immigration policy

What History Will Remember About 2025 and 2026

Fifty years from now, historians will note that in 2025–2026, the United States experienced its first net negative migration in fifty years, that more than 90,000 people formally renounced their legal rights to leave a country that had worn them down to the point of surrender, and that this historic demographic shift was organized, celebrated, and funded to the tune of $70 billion by the U.S. Congress. This is no trivial matter. It is a choice of civilization.

American history has been shaped by successive waves of immigrants who chose this country as the destination for their ambition and courage. The doctrine of re-migration—making life miserable enough so that people leave of their own accord—is the exact negation of this founding identity. It does not make America greater. It shrinks it—demographically, economically, and morally.

What We Must Refuse to Normalize

The 90,000 voluntary departures documented by TRAC and the Los Angeles Times are not the result of a successful immigration policy. They are the result of a deliberate strategy of attrition—inhumane detention conditions, administrative freezes on legal cases, the denial of the right to work, and the threat of deportation to a distant third country. These departures are not voluntary. They are the product of methodical and well-documented state coercion.

The West deserves better than this. Firm border control is legitimate. The defense of national sovereignty is legitimate. But transforming the state apparatus into a machine for producing human misery, using suffering as a tool of public policy, and funding exclusion with tens of billions of dollars in public funds—that is a line that Western democracies should not cross. And if they do cross it, they must at least have the courage to name it and criticize it.

Signed, Maxime Marquette, columnist