Trump administration tells 500,000 immigrants to ‘self-deport’

The Trump administration began sending termination notices Thursday to about 500,000 foreign nationals who had received temporary stays to live and work in the United States under a special humanitarian exception.

The so-called CHNV program was open to applicants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela from 2023 until it was terminated by President Donald Trump earlier this year.

Recipients of the notices from the Department of Homeland Security are encouraged to “self-deport immediately.”

The move came two weeks after the Supreme Court ruled that DHS can order CHNV participants to leave the country, even as they pursue a lawsuit challenging Trump’s revocation of the Biden administration-era program.

If immigrants agree to “self-deport” using DHS’s Home Mobile App, they will receive travel assistance and a $1,000 bonus upon arrival in their home country.

A month ago, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to revoke the protected status of nearly 350,000 more immigrants, all from Venezuela, who were allowed to remain in the U.S. under the Temporary Status Program.

Immigrants in the CHNV program had been granted temporary, two-year stays after leaving their home countries because of conflicts there, or unsafe living or working conditions.

In a statement on the revocation of the CHNV program, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin accused the Biden administration of having “lied to America.”

Yet as DHS sent out notices to foreign nationals Thursday, Trump himself bemoaned the effect that his own administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement actions were having on the farming, hotel and leisure sectors, which sometimes employ undocumented workers.

“Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long term workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post Thursday morning.

“In many cases the Criminals allowed into our Country by the VERY Stupid Biden Open Borders Policy are applying for those jobs,” Trump wrote.

“This is no good. We must protect our Farmers, but get the CRIMINALS OUT OF THE USA,” he wrote. “Changes are coming!”

Speaking to reporters later, Trump reiterated his belief that farmers were being harmed by his administration’s deportation regime.

“Farmers are being hurt badly … They have very good workers, they’ve worked for them for 20 years, they’re not citizens but they’ve turned out to be great,” Trump said.

“We can’t take farmers and take all their people and send them back,” he said, an apparent reference to the deportation of undocumented agricultural workers that his administration has pursued.

“You go into a farm and you look and people … they’ve been there for 20, 25, years, and they’ve worked great and the owner of the farm loves them and everything else,” Trump continued. “And then you’re supposed to throw them out.”

“So we’re, we’re going to have an order on that, pretty soon, I think. We can’t do that to our farmers and leisure too, hotels,” the president said.

The White House did not immediately reply to a request for additional details about what such an order might look like.