One of the striking proofs of the fact that most of the pro-illegal immigrant sob stories are pure propaganda is that few people in the United States know that the Trump administration bends over backward to help illegal aliens get back home and back on their feet, provided they voluntarily leave.
Far from being punitive, Trump's policies for self-deportees provide not just assistance in leaving, but substantial financial benefits for doing so.
I read the article, and she wanted to go home, and told the reporter she was happy after she arrived. The activists around her tried to scare her to keep her from leaving, but she did what was best for her and her children.
— funkychicken (@funkychicken) May 27, 2026
Still, anti-ICE activists are angry whenever an illegal alien decides to leave, because their position has nothing to do with compassion and everything to do with population replacement, or "decolonization," as they put it.
Cecilia stood outside a federal immigration field office in Centennial, chewing her lip and weighing the few choices left to her. Behind her, piled in a car, was what remained of her family’s life in the United States.
It was early May, and a few feet away, her three sons took turns sticking their shoes into old prairie dog holes in the dirt, the youngest’s Crocs breaking through cobwebs. As the boys looked from the ground to their mother, she explained that if she returned to the office the next day, immigration agents had promised to detain the family and arrange their return to Venezuela.
The Centennial office building was similar to one into which her husband and the boys’ father had disappeared late last year. But unlike Ronald, who’d been arrested at what he thought was a routine appointment, Cecilia arrived that day hoping that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement would take them away.
She and her three children — ages 12, 9 and 6 — had walked for three months to get to the United States in 2024, crossing notorious expanses of jungle and mountains for the prospect of a stable future and a reunion with Ronald, who’d come earlier that year. But like other families split by the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, they now found themselves struggling to make ends meet in a single-parent household, with no regular paycheck and few options.
Cecilia, you see, worked really hard to break our laws, so shouldn't she have a right to stay here and enjoy all the benefits of being in the United States?
The loss of a primary source of income, coupled with the federal government’s efforts to keep many immigrants indefinitely detained, has spurred families like Cecilia’s — and detainees like her husband — to stop fighting and leave the country. They’ve given up on asylum cases or other legal defenses in favor of a swift release from detention and from financial collapse.
An unprecedented number have asked to leave while in detention, while tens of thousands more have, like Cecilia, signed up to leave in exchange for a promise of cash and a flight home. Many more have simply left on their own, immigration advocates say.
Cecilia, who had been seeking asylum in the U.S., said outside the Centennial office that her family would be flown first to Arizona and kept in a detention center before they left. She believed the government would expedite their exit, she said in Spanish, because she was seven months pregnant. Earlier, she said she’d heard that families could sleep in hotels.
Despite the fact that Cecilia would get a large check—$10,000—a hotel stay, and a free flight home, immigration advocates tried to convince her to stay. Cecilia actually wanted to go back home, knowing that her asylum claim was unlikely to succeed and she would be returning to her family, but we are supposed to feel awful because Trump is enforcing immigration law by providing carrots and sticks.
Even the carrots taste bad to the people determined to "decolonize" the United States.
The women profiled in the story were the spouses of men who had already been deported. Almost everybody who is getting deported is a man, likely due to the fact that ICE and CBP have been focused on apprehending criminals.
Ruiz’s husband was removed from the Aurora detention center on the same day as Ronald, and she’d befriended Cecilia afterward. Across the nation, men have made up the overwhelming majority of those arrested in immigration detentions. Of roughly 4,800 people initially detained in a Colorado ICE facility last year, nearly 9 in every 10 were adult men, according to ICE data analyzed by The Post. Eighty-six percent of those arrested by ICE in the state during President Donald Trump’s first year back in office were also men.
Of those detained, 477 men were married, according to the ICE data. For Ronald and nearly 2,000 more people, the data provides no information about their marital status.
“We are now seeing the breadwinner be the person that is getting detained often,” said Andrea Loya, the executive director of Casa De Paz, which works with detainee families in Aurora. “That’s the person going to work, the person who was driving the car.”
The pitch of the Denver Post story is basically "Think of the women." Sure, Trump is focused on deporting the men for obvious reasons, but that means that women and children are left behind!
Except...they need not be. In fact, if they voluntarily self-deport, they are richly rewarded. No long treks through the desert, no cartels. A check and a free flight home to their families.
During her first visit to the ICE office this month, security guards told Cecilia to submit a self-deportation application through the CBP Home App, through a program in which immigrants are offered incentives — including a cash payout — if they agree to leave. But she had already tried that, unsuccessfully, and showed up at the office unannounced out of desperation. “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,” then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said last summer. “If they don’t, we will find them, we will deport them, and they will never return.”
Opposing the Trump policy clearly doesn't stem from a concern for the illegal migrants per se—they can get a very good deal, in fact, and even the chance to return legally.
What's really at stake is the commitment to open borders. And by that, it's not even a commitment to the principle of open borders, since none of these advocates are up in arms about the fact that Mexico's immigration laws are far harsher than the United States, and Mexico wants nothing to do with feeding or housing illegal immigrants.
It's open borders for the United States, and more generally for First World countries. The goal is to redistribute our income, which amounts to pillaging our country.
All the other arguments are just smoke and mirrors. If asylum for genuine refugees were the point, other destinations make much more logistical sense than trekking all the way through dangerous territory to get to the US. Mexico, Brazil, El Salvador, or any of many other countries would serve that purpose.
Who is pressuring Mexico to take in the refugees who aren't usually refugees?
You see the same thing in Europe, with Middle Eastern migrants. No Arab country wants to touch them, so off to Europe they are sent.
I'm not unsympathetic to the plight of actual refugees, or, for that matter, to the illegal immigrants who are coming here for a better life. Being born in Syria or a war-torn country is not something one chooses, and obviously, economic opportunities in the US are far better than in poor countries with corrupt governments.
But poor countries are poor because they are corrupt and have cultures incompatible with prosperity, not because they are resource-poor. You only need to look at the island of Hispaniola or the two Koreas to see how important government and culture are to prosperity.
And if there is one thing we have seen with massive illegal immigration waves, when you import the third world, you import the third world. Especially when you import third-worlders by the million.
I like immigration. I tear up when I see naturalization ceremonies. But when the very first thing an immigrant does is commit fraud or break the law, that's a pretty poor start to a long-term relationship.
Trump's policies aren't cruel or necessarily punitive. They are actually quite generous to people who agree to obey the law, and are punitive only to those who insist on continuing to break it.
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