An increasing number of undocumented immigrants are now choosing to leave the U.S. voluntarily, attempting to avoid the legal consequences of official deportation, according to multiple sources on the ground, Breitbart reports.
“I’ve been a journalist for more than 25 years, but I never thought I would see this — ‘paquetes de retorno,’” said Alfredo Corchado, an experienced journalist reporting between Texas and Mexico and currently serving as executive editor at the Puente News Collaborative.
During remarks at a March 26 event hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations, Corchado explained:
“[Coyotes] are now offering packages where [migrant] people can go back home …. [If] you want to go home, or you want to go back to Honduras, or maybe you don’t want to go back to Honduras because it’s too dangerous. [Or] you don’t want to go to Guatemala, but maybe you want to go to Costa Rica, and so they’re offering these [smuggling] packages where you can just go back home. Not all of them are taking it, I mean, many [are].”
Those who are removed from the country by immigration authorities face separation from family members, are detained in cramped facilities for extended periods, and are legally barred from reentering the U.S. for a decade or more. Many also lose access to their belongings and financial resources.
According to Jeff Lamour, a businessman in Albertville, Alabama, Haitians are opting to leave before they are forcibly removed: “Haitians are self-deporting right now because they don’t want the worst thing … because [the government] does send them back to Haiti immediately.”
In recent years, many Haitians migrated to Albertville, replacing American workers in poultry plants. They obtained legal work status under policies from the Biden administration, but those protections are now eroding under changes brought by Trump-aligned officials.
Lamour described how this departure has grown into a profitable underground economy:
“This [self-deporting] industry with the coyotes, it has become a multi-million dollar industry over here now. You got those guys that are going from Indiana, from Alabama, in those vans where they’re smuggling people to New Mexico, to border states.
“They’re making a ton of money. If they go deposit money at the bank, it’s going to raise a red flag. You know, I had a gentleman a couple days ago trying to buy a car with cash, straight cash. He just don’t know what to do with it because he has a lot of cash from the shuttle industry.”
Lamour also told 1819News.com that smugglers are charging high fees: “Smugglers ‘charge them $10,000 per head because a lot of people that are working are saving their money,’” and he noted that many Haitians are choosing to return to countries like Chile, where they had previously lived before the U.S. border opened more widely under President Biden.
Others are simply vanishing from public view, making efforts to avoid detection. Lamour explained that some have gone so far as to sell their vehicles to reduce the risk of getting stopped by police:
“I sell cars for a living. I have my mechanic sitting next to me right there. He can tell you, as my witness — did we not have a guy come over here, return his car, because he’s scared to be deported? I had guys selling their car for $500 just so they won’t be deported. We see that every day.”
One migrant, Lamour recounted, endured an especially harrowing journey: “His wife and kids died in the [Darien Gap], and he had to leave them behind because he had to survive and save himself. Once he arrived in Mexico, he had to literally stay at the gay bathhouse [to avoid robbers, before he] made it over here through a Catholic charity.”
Despite these individual stories, the number of migrants choosing to leave remains small compared to the overall estimated population of 18 million undocumented individuals, about half of whom entered under Biden-era policies.
The New York Times also reported on this trend. One migrant named Cristian, living in Denver since 2023, has held jobs delivering food and working in construction. The article notes:
“Since arriving in Denver in 2023, Cristian, 29, has delivered meals and worked on construction sites. (Like other migrants I interviewed, he worried that immigration agents would find him and spoke on the condition that I identify him only by his given name.) He sends money to his wife and children in Venezuela. Cristian does not have any tattoos, a customary gang indicator, he said. He possesses a work permit and an active asylum application, which theoretically protects him from imminent deportation.
“But the enforcement climate since Trump took office has changed Cristian’s calculus ‘360 degrees,’ he told me. With the help of an American friend who escorted him to several immigration offices, he made an appointment to appear before a judge today so he could request a voluntary departure from the United States. (Immigrants who receive formal permission to leave have an easier time returning later.)…
“A family in Chicago recently left for Mexico, according to their lawyer. People have abandoned Springfield, Ohio — the town where Trump claimed Haitians were eating their pets — employers there told me. Others are contemplating leaving from elsewhere, like Houston.”
Meanwhile, in Central and South America, there is evidence that migrants are reconsidering the dangerous trek north. Caleb Vitello, a senior official in the Trump administration’s ICE agency, spoke about this at the Council on Foreign Relations:
“It is true that people are going different directions,” he said, pointing to decreased movement through the notoriously deadly Darien Gap between Colombia and Panama. “Because people aren’t risking that walk or that dangerous journey through there,” he said.
This trend has alarmed industries that depend on immigration to supply a labor force, housing demand, and consumer base. Business coalitions say declining immigration will hurt growth.
“The only way that we continue to grow economically is actually by increasing our levels of immigration,” said Andrea Flores, vice-president at FWD.us, an advocacy group backed by West Coast investors. At the CFR forum, Flores added:
“I think some of the inquiries I get most around the country are not from the border [area] and not from major urban areas. It’s from places like Nebraska [where] I routinely will get outreach from, saying, ‘How do we push for getting us elder care workers, childcare workers? How do we get some restaurant workers to revitalize some of our small towns? … So I’m very pro [asking] “Why don’t we offer, you know, English language courses? Why does the federal government provide that? How do you help facilitate a new immigrant’s arrival so they don’t create the type of social challenges [for] any country facing increased immigration?”’
Not everyone agrees with that vision. Senator JD Vance argued that over-reliance on imported labor has discouraged innovation and undermined American workers.
“The promise of cheap labor is ‘a drug that too many American firms got addicted to … [and] globalization’s hunger for cheap labor is a problem precisely because it’s been bad for innovation,’” Vance said at a mid-March investor event. “Real innovation makes us more productive, but it also, I think, dignifies our workers. It boosts our standard of living. It strengthens our workforce and the relative value of its labor.”
Some economic leaders, however, believe that shrinking populations in wealthy nations could ultimately accelerate technological progress. At a World Economic Forum event in Saudi Arabia, BlackRock founder Larry Fink commented:
“I can argue, in the developed countries, the big winners are the countries that have shrinking populations.”
Fink elaborated further:
“That’s something that most people never talked about. We always used to think shrinking population is a cause for negative [economic] growth. But in my conversations with the leadership of these large, developed countries [such as China and Japan] that have xenophobic anti-immigration policies, they don’t allow anybody to come in — [so they have] shrinking demographics — these countries will rapidly develop robotics and AI and technology …”
“If a promise of all that transforms productivity, which most of us think it will [emphasis added] — we’ll be able to elevate the standard living in countries, the standard of living for individuals, even with shrinking populations,” Fink said.
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