Last month, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem praised a new Trump administration effort to persuade undocumented immigrants to return to their homelands on their own. She said a new two-year, $200 million television ad campaign, a $1,000 cash stipend to pay for plane tickets home and a new “CBP Home” app were prompting undocumented people to self-deport.
“If they wait until we arrest them and we remove them, they’ll never get the chance to come back to the United States,” Noem said when she was asked about the program at a news conference. “We know thousands and thousands of people have used the app.”
Migrants and Democrats, though, question the effectiveness of the campaign, which remains unclear six months after its launch. Noem, who promised last month to release the exact number of people who have self-deported using the app, hasn’t done so.
The Department of Homeland Security didn’t respond to repeated requests for the figures.
Democrats question the cost of the TV ads, as well. And undocumented migrants and advocates told NBC News they don’t trust Noem, her ads and Customs and Border Protection’s new CBP Home app.
“You just can’t get on a plane tomorrow and just go,” said Lauren, a mother of two who lives in Ohio with her undocumented husband and asked to be identified only by her first name. She expressed anger at Noem, saying that the family doesn’t plan to use the CBP app and that self-deportation will take them close to a year.
“You know, we have a home. We have to sell this home, get rid of everything that’s in this home,” she added. “It’s just, you can’t just leave like she says.”
A woman whose husband is also undocumented and requested anonymity to speak, citing fear of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said she and her husband have decided he will self-deport but she will remain in the United States with their children. He won’t use the CBP Home app, she said, because they don’t want to allow the administration to “count” him.
“To think that ‘this is so easy, well, just pack up your stuff and go,’” she said, “well, it’s not that easy, though. It’s thousands of dollars.”
The woman said her family’s fear of arrest and potentially brutal conditions in immigration detention centers persuaded her husband to self-deport, not Noem’s television ads.
“If something were to happen, he would never come back to us the same person,” she said, referring to the mental health toll detention could take on him. “And he doesn’t deserve that because he’s not a criminal, and I don’t know how I would explain that to my kids.”
Fewer downloads
Despite Noem’s statement that tens of thousands of migrants have used the new CBP Home app, data on its usage suggests the program got off to a slow start.
During a five-week period this spring, from March 10 to April 16, 356 people used the CBP Home app to self-deport, according to DHS data NBC News obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. Since it responded to the FOIA request in July, DHS has declined to provide further data.
A CBP spokesperson said that Noem’s TV ads have been effective and that NBC News’ data didn’t cover the period after the formal announcement of the broader program, known as “Project Homecoming,” on May 9.
“The data report you have is outdated and comes from before May’s announcement of Project Homecoming,” they said by email. “Tens of thousands of illegal aliens have utilized the app and taken control of their departure and there continues to be sustained sign-ups for the app.”
CBP Home downloads spiked on Jan. 20, when the Trump administration took office, and rose again in March, according to data from Appfigures, a private company that tracks app downloads. But they have declined since then, including after Project Homecoming was announced in May.
The app was downloaded 72,288 times globally in March. In July, global downloads dropped 75%, to 18,208, and in August, it declined to 8,318.
In all, the CBP Home app has been downloaded 320,778 times since President Donald Trump returned to office in January, according to Appfigures. But only 91,000 of those downloads were inside the United States. DHS declined to say how many people completed the process and used the app to confirm they had left the country.
Democrats say ads are political
House Democrats have criticized Noem’s use of taxpayer money to pay for a two-year nationwide ad campaign they say is designed to boost her and Trump politically. The ads feature Noem praising Trump’s leadership and video of Trump saluting troops and striding through the White House.
“We should be focused on keeping the American people safe and secure, not producing glossy propaganda with tax dollars,” Bennie Thompson, D-Miss, the ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee, told NBC News in a statement.
Critics also question whether DHS’ TV ads are reaching undocumented migrants. According to data from AdImpact, an advertising intelligence firm, only 20% of the ads that have aired domestically have Spanish subtitles, and the rest have been in English.
Asked why only 20% of the TV ads have Spanish subtitles, a spokesperson said DHS targets Spanish speakers through digital ads. The spokesperson said the majority of the campaign’s digital ad buys target Hispanics, with at least 918 million impressions across Hispanic video and audio platforms.
Noem cites savings
Noem has argued that the department’s self-deportation campaign is ultimately cost-effective. She said at a congressional hearing this year that persuading undocumented migrants to self-deport is far cheaper than ICE’s detaining and deporting them.
“For us to deport someone … we have to go out and find that individual, arrest and detain them and remove them from the country. It costs upwards to $17,000,” Noem said. “That cost of self-deportation is $4,500, so much, much cheaper for the American taxpayer.”
Researchers at the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports Trump’s immigration crackdown and advocates for reducing immigration to the United States, say self-deportations that aren’t registered on the CBP Home app may be occurring.
It reports a large recent decline in the number of foreign-born workers in the United States, citing Labor Department data. The number of foreign-born workers in the United States was 50.4 million in January, a 10-year high, according to the department’s Current Population Survey. As of June, the figure had dropped by 1.3 million, to 49.1 million.
But there is no way to know exactly how many of the foreign-born workers who left the United States had been in the country illegally.
Complaints about app
Some undocumented migrants have said they found self-deporting through the CBP Home app difficult. They cited issues from a lack of information to problems obtaining travel documents they needed, Noticias Telemundo reported in July.
DHS officials told Telemundo, NBCUniversal’s Spanish-language network, at the time that the department can help immigrants who want to self-deport get the travel documents they need and book travel tickets.
But a Venezuelan immigrant told Telemundo she initially used the app to try to self-deport but received few instructions from DHS about how to safely depart the country. Ultimately, she said, she left for Mexico on her own using a Mexican passport she received before she arrived in the United States.
“We thought it would be a much faster process,” she said.
