NARRATIVE: The 90,000 voluntary departures — the silent exile of immigrants under Trump's pressure

Introduction: An exodus that dare not speak its name

The figure that shatters an era

More than 90,000 immigrants have obtained what American authorities call a voluntary departure since the beginning of the second Trump administration, according to federal immigration court data analyzed by TRAC, an independent research organization affiliated with Syracuse University, and confirmed in June 2026 by the Los Angeles Times. This figure represents seven times more than in the final sixteen months of the Biden administration. Seven times. This is not a trend — it is a rupture.

Behind this bureaucratic phrase — voluntary departure — lies a human reality of cold brutality: people who built their lives in the United States, sometimes for decades, who give up their legal rights, pay for their own plane tickets, and leave. Not because they freely choose to. But because the systemic pressure exerted by the American state has made them unable to continue living, working, or simply breathing on that soil.

The mechanics of a departure that is not truly free

Voluntary departure is, under American law, an alternative to forced deportation. It theoretically allows the person to avoid an official deportation order on their record, which may leave open the door to a possible legal return in the future. But in practice, according to the Marshall Project, which investigated New Jersey detention centers in May 2026, this choice is often extracted under inhumane conditions — rotten food, lack of water, punitive confinement, and the constant threat of deportation to a third country, sometimes Central Africa, for someone originally from Latin America.

This narrative is not that of a romantic exile or a freely undertaken journey. It is the narrative of a silent exile, methodically organized by an administration that decided, in the words of its own border coordinator Tom Homan, that making immigrants' lives sufficiently miserable would be enough to convince them to leave.

The doctrine of voluntary misery — how the Trump administration theorized pressure

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 in the interior and conducted these operations, it would force those who are here illegally to leave on their own," he stated, according to a Los Angeles Times analysis published June 12, 2026. The objective is not solely physical deportation — it is psychological and economic surrender.

This strategy has been deployed on all fronts simultaneously: banning immigrants without permanent status from accessing federally guaranteed small business loans, revoking work permits, blocking the processing of green card applications, banning entry or visa processing for nationals of 75 countries, freezing pending files for people from 39 countries already present on American soil. It is a bureaucratic spider web designed to suffocate without leaving visible marks.

David Bier and the "sledgehammer" against the legal system

David Bier, an analyst at the Cato Institute — a libertarian organization, not a bastion of the left — summarized the situation with surgical precision in the columns of the Los Angeles Times: "The priority is to force people to leave the country or not to come, regardless of legal status or any other criteria. They are taking a sledgehammer to the system." This testimony is significant: it comes from an economist who normally advocates immigration as an engine of economic growth.

Bier also specified that Trump's visa policies affect half of all legal immigrants arriving from abroad, and that the steepest declines were recorded in the categories of international students, highly skilled workers, and refugees. In other words, it is not only undocumented immigration that is being targeted — it is immigration as a whole.

The 90,000 faces of a forced departure — who leaves and why

Detention as a lever of capitulation

The Marshall Project documented, in a report published May 30, 2026, the conditions of detention at the Delaney Hall center in Newark, New Jersey: spoiled and expired food, sometimes infested with live worms, insufficient medical care, unsanitary housing, and what detainees described as the systematic use of solitary confinement as a coercive tool to push them to accept voluntary departure. A guard reportedly told a detainee, according to the Arizona Daily Star cited by the Marshall Project: "This is my job. I have to make your life miserable so you ask for your own deportation."

Among the cases documented by the Marshall Project were an openly gay Russian man, an Afghan with ties to the US-backed former government, and an Iranian dissident — all facing a potentially fatal return to their country of origin. DHS and private company CoreCivic 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 take place is one of unprecedented mortality in detention. CNN reported in early June 2026 that nearly 50 people had died in ICE detention since Trump returned to power, making 2025 the deadliest year in at least two decades of ICE detention, with 2026 on track to be worse. The Associated Press added that at least 10 ICE detainees had taken their own lives since January 2025 — whereas ICE had historically recorded zero or one suicide per year throughout its 23 years of existence.

Faced with this picture, accepting a voluntary departure — even paying one's own airfare, even abandoning years of court proceedings — can seem like the only reasonably safe option. This is precisely the calculation the administration counts on detainees to make.

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

A cleaning woman and her evaporating rights

Raquel Molina, 65 years old, a Salvadoran immigrant, spent her days cleaning toilets and vacuuming airplane seats at Boston's Logan International Airport for nearly thirty years. She had a valid Social Security number. She had the right to work. Her wage: $19.75 an hour. Last summer, her supervisor told her she no longer had the right to access the airport's secure zones — and she was laid off, along with dozens of other immigrant colleagues who had legally worked at Logan for years.

The Trump administration had decided that Temporary Protected Status (TPS) — the humanitarian visa under which Molina had legally lived for decades — no longer constituted a form of "permission to reside," according to Justin Long, a Customs and Border Protection spokesperson, cited by the Boston Globe in its May 30, 2026 investigation. The practical translation: Molina could no longer be considered an authorized resident, and therefore could no longer receive the government clearances required to access secure zones. "I did not understand what was happening," she said. "I had worked hard. This news put me into a state of shock."

A cascading logic of exclusion

The Molina case illustrates the systemic logic described by the Boston Globe: the administration has not only toughened conditions for undocumented immigrants — it has progressively downgraded the legal status of millions of immigrants who previously had the right to work. TPS holders, DACA recipients, pending asylum seekers — all see their protection reinterpreted, eroded, or eliminated through administrative memoranda.

Gabriel and Ana Lorenzo, undocumented immigrants in the United States, have four American-born daughters. They had been paying their 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 picked up by the Boston Globe. Ana Lorenzo had to return to work as a cleaner earlier than her doctors recommended after a hysterectomy — lacking the resources to pay rent.

The ideology behind the machinery — "remigration" in the White House

A secret office to organize exile

The Guardian revealed on June 15, 2026 that within the US State Department there exists a "remigration bureau" — a unit devoted to promoting the ideology of "remigration," a term originating in European white nationalist circles that designates the objective of making living conditions so punitive for immigrants that they leave on their own to return to their countries of origin. The Department of Homeland Security had even posted explicit support for this initiative on X, writing: "Remigration has never been higher or clearer."

This ideology, imported from European identitarian circles — notably Austria's FPÖ movement and its equivalents in France and Germany — now has currency at the very top of the American executive. Stephen Miller, Trump's senior adviser, had laid the conceptual groundwork in a post on X the previous 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. This is ethnic nationalism, formulated as public policy.

The silent bureaucratic normalization of a radical ideology

What is striking about the rise of remigration as state doctrine is its silent bureaucratic translation. No spectacular legislation, no congressional debate — a series of memoranda, administrative revisions, regulations published on a Friday afternoon to avoid weekend headlines. On May 22, 2026, the USCIS published a memorandum requiring the majority of foreigners 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 with pending applications, according to El País.

The Cato Institute specified that this group includes approximately 1.2 million immigrants with pending permanent residency applications, many of whom would be forced to "self-deport" to continue the process. For nationals of the 75 countries under visa bans, there is not even an exit door: returning home to continue the process would simply mean returning home for good.

The Cubans — betrayed by those they helped elect

May Díaz, Camagüey, Houston, Miami — and permanent fear

May Díaz is thirty-six years old. She was born in Camagüey, Cuba. On July 11, 2021, she participated in the historic protests against the Cuban communist regime, was struck by police batons, and left her country three months later. She entered the United States on October 13, 2021, with about fifteen other migrants, in the Mexicali region. Under other 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 her apartment door in Houston. She was not home. She packed her belongings and moved to Miami. According to the Guardian of June 14, 2026, she has since lived in permanent fear of a knock on the door.

Her case illustrates a 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 of any Hispanic group, according to the Guardian. These are precisely the communities that put Trump in power with the hope of a firmer foreign policy against Havana — and who now find themselves fleeing ICE agents in the streets of Miami, which has become the country's leading metropolis for deportations since the start of 2026.

Eight thousand Cubans expelled — more than in four years of the first term

The figure is unforgiving: since Trump's return to the presidency, nearly 8,000 Cubans have been expelled from the United States according to ICE statistics cited by the Guardian — more than double the 3,385 expelled during the entire first Trump term from 2017 to 2021. Human Rights Watch documented that among those expelled are elderly people with serious health problems who had lived for years on American soil.

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

Negative migration — a historic reversal unprecedented since the Great Depression

Brookings: more people leaving the United States than arriving

In January 2026, the Brookings Institution published an estimate that hit like a thunderbolt: the United States recorded a negative net migration in 2025 for the first time in at least fifty years — meaning more people left the country than arrived. The estimated range runs from -10,000 to -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, note that this reversal is primarily driven by a collapse in new arrivals — suspension of refugee programs, visa restrictions, effective border closures — combined with an increase in deportations and voluntary departures. For 2026, their projections are even darker: net migration could reach -925,000 people, according to the high scenario. This is a demographic transformation of historic magnitude.

The economic consequences of an ideological choice

The US Census had recorded international migration of 2.7 million people to the United States in 2024. In 2025, this 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 market-friendly institutions — both concluded that this migration decline constitutes a structural economic weakness that is not linked to the business cycle but directly to immigration policy.

David Bier of the Cato Institute framed it differently: Trump has reduced legal immigration more than illegal immigration. The biggest declines occurred in international student visas, skilled worker visas, and refugee admissions — precisely the categories that feed America's knowledge economy. Technology companies, universities, and hospitals are all beginning to feel the effects.

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

The trap of administrative freezing

Armin is forty-two years old. He came to the United States from Iran in 2019 on a student visa. He earned a doctorate. In November 2025, he received a research grant that finally allowed him to work as an associate researcher at an American university. But the processing of his work authorization has been administratively frozen since December — without explanation, without immediate recourse. His university told him it could not hire him without that authorization. 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 of June 12, 2026.

"I can't believe it," he said. "I am doing research whose benefits are in the national interest. You'd expect government support. Unfortunately, they make no distinction. They don't look at your CV." His green card application — filed under a provision allowing highly skilled immigrants to apply without employer sponsorship — is also indefinitely pending, stuck in the same administrative freeze as tens of thousands of other files.

The silent purge of foreign talent

Armin's story is not isolated. The administration has blocked the processing of immigration files for nationals of 39 countries already on American soil — a measure that notably affects Indian, Iranian, Nigerian, and Mexican engineers, researchers, and physicians. At the same time, visas for 75 countries have been suspended for new entrants. 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 unable to renew their work authorizations or stranded abroad with no way to return to campus. Silicon Valley's competitive position — which rests massively on foreign talent — is beginning to suffer a slow but persistent hemorrhage whose competitive effects will be measured in ten years.

Project Homecoming — state-funded expulsion with a smile

$60 bonus to leave America

Since spring 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 financial 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 chartered flight on June 2: 38 to Honduras, 26 to Colombia, according to DHS data reported by KRGV.

Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem summarized the proposition with a candor bordering on menace: "If you are here illegally, use the CBP Home app to control your departure and receive financial support to return home. If you do not, you will be subject to fines, arrest, deportation, and you will never be allowed to return." The choice between leaving voluntarily with $1,000 or being forcibly deported to Congo or Rwanda — third countries used as deportation hubs — is presented as a free choice.

The subsidy of fear

Immigration lawyers immediately contested the program's legality and ethics. According to the Marshall Project, the financial incentives run counter to existing law and judicial practices: an immigrant who accepts the program is supposed not to have an active deportation order, but the actual conditions and long-term legal consequences are presented in a misleading way. Conchita Cruz, executive director of the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project, warned: "We fear this is a pretext for pushing people out of the asylum system and off the labor market."

Moreover, Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies — an organization that otherwise supports immigration restrictions — himself put the official DHS figures in perspective: according to him, the 2.2 million "self-deportations" claimed by the administration are largely exaggerated, and departures via the CBP Home app actually represent only a few thousand people. The numerical propaganda is part of the strategy.

Detention centers — hell as a persuasion 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 documented symbols of the Trump detention policy. In May 2026, detainees launched a hunger strike to protest conditions: spoiled and expired food containing live worms, insufficient medical care, unsanitary housing, and what groups described as the systematic use of solitary confinement as a coercive tool. Federal agents responded to outside protesters with pepper spray and rubber bullets — including, according to the Marshall Project, against Senator Andy Kim, who was struck by projectiles on the margins of the demonstration.

DHS denied any hunger strike on social media. Tom Homan declared that strikers would be force-fed "if it gets worse." DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin claimed it was only "a few individuals" who wanted their "usual ethnic food" — and that they could "go home and eat whatever they want." Meanwhile, California Attorney General Rob Bonta described conditions at the Adelanto facility in Southern California as "cruel, inhumane, and unacceptable," after detainees described receiving only beans and bread, enduring freezing temperatures, and lacking access to toilets.

A system cracking under pressure on all sides

The capacity of detention centers is under extreme pressure: facilities across the country were holding approximately 60,000 people in April 2026, down from over 70,000 in January — a slight decline reflecting the acceleration of departures, voluntary or forced, rather than any policy loosening. ICE was conducting approximately 1,000 arrests per day in early March, according to TRAC, down from a peak of approximately 1,400 per day in mid-January.

Congress has just voted $70 billion in additional funding for DHS, including $30 billion for ICE and nearly $20 billion for the Border Patrol — a blank check according to AP of June 5, 2026, signed into a twelve-page law without conditions or safeguards, funding ICE operations through 2029. The White House's official objective remains the expulsion of one million people per year — an objective not yet achieved, which explains the constant intensification of pressure.

Minnesota, Florida, California — the America of resisting states

Judges who defy Washington

Faced with federal policy, judicial resistance is organizing. Several appeals courts have challenged the constitutionality of the Trump rule barring immigrants who entered illegally from requesting release on bail — a measure that condemns them to remain detained throughout their proceedings, sometimes for months. Twenty states and the District of Columbia had already sued the federal administration over access to federally funded community clinics, obtaining a provisional suspension of exclusion measures.

In Minnesota, data from Axios of June 1, 2026 shows that the Fort Snelling immigration court saw its asylum approval rate fall from 13% under Biden to less than 2% under Trump. Since Trump's re-election, nearly 2,200 asylum seekers have withdrawn their applications, compared to approximately 900 during all four years of Biden. Withdrawals are not freely chosen renunciations — 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 now face growing financial pressure from Washington, which has threatened to cut their federal funding. In California, attorneys general are multiplying reports on detention conditions, but they cannot physically stop deportations. Local resistance is real but structurally limited in the face of federal power.

In Pennsylvania counties that house ICE detention centers — such as Clearfield County, home to the Moshannon Valley facility — local elected officials are exploring their contractual levers. Commissioner Dave Glass declared: "There is no reason we can't put conditions on it," referring to the ICE contract renewal scheduled for September 2026. These county-level battles against a federal agency illustrate the asymmetry of the fight.

The economic cost of forced exile — what America is losing

A workforce vanishing from strategic sectors

The Trump administration claims that strict immigration policy benefits American workers by reducing labor market competition. The reality documented by economists is more nuanced: in construction, agriculture, hospitality, and personal care — industries with high proportions of immigrants — data shows a growing labor shortage, not an improvement in wages or conditions for native workers.

Both the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute concluded that the migration decline now constitutes a "structural normal weakness" of the American economy, independent of the economic cycle. International migration had dropped from 2.7 million in 2024 to 1.3 million in 2025 — a 52% fall in a single year — and projections for 2026 forecast a continuation of this decline. This transformation mechanically reduces the United States' long-term growth potential.

The American university and the threat to innovation

American universities depend on international students — who pay tuition two to three times higher than residents — to finance a significant portion of their budgets. In 2025, international student enrollments fell for the first time in decades at many institutions. Research campuses are seeing foreign postdoctoral researchers and scientists depart as they can no longer renew their work authorizations.

Silicon Valley — where the majority of startups founded between 2010 and 2020 had at least one immigrant or immigrant's child as a founder — is beginning to see some companies consider relocating teams to Canada, Germany, or Australia to bypass American work visa restrictions. This is a slow hemorrhage, difficult to quantify immediately, but whose competitive effects will be measured in ten years.

The West facing its mirror — what the American exodus says about the world

A fracture in the democratic model

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

European chancelleries are watching what is happening with a mixture of concern and unease: concern because the rise of identitarian parties in Europe — who use precisely the same vocabulary of remigration — is bolstered by the American example; unease because several European governments have themselves adopted restrictive immigration policies. The line between firm immigration policy and a program of systematic exclusion is thin, and the United States is its full-scale laboratory.

Trump, necessary evil or irreversible rupture

I believe in the strategic necessity of a strong and united America against China, Russia, and Iran. I understand the argument that Trump embodies a form of firmness that his predecessors failed to maintain on economic and security issues. But firmness at the border does not require 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 sixty-five-year-old Salvadoran cleaning woman, the young Cuban woman who fled communism and finds herself fleeing ICE, the families of American children impoverished by a tax withdrawal — is a real and criticizable human cost. Defending the West does not mean treating some of its residents as enemies to be expelled. The greatness of the West rests precisely on its capacity to be better than its adversaries.

Conclusion: Exile is not an immigration policy

What history will record of 2025 and 2026

In fifty years, historians will note that the United States experienced in 2025–2026 its first negative net migration in fifty years, that more than 90,000 people formally surrendered their legal rights to leave a country that had exhausted them to the point of capitulation, and that this historic demographic rupture was organized, celebrated, and financed to the tune of $70 billion by the American Congress. This is not trivial. It is a civilizational choice.

American history was made by successive waves of immigrants who chose this country as the destination of their ambition and courage. The doctrine of remigration — making life miserable enough that people leave of their own accord — is the precise negation of that founding identity. It does not make America greater. It makes it smaller: demographically, economically, 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 exhaustion strategy — inhumane detention conditions, administrative freezing of legal files, elimination of work rights, threat of deportation to a distant third country. These departures are not free. They are the product of a methodical, documented state coercion.

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

Signed Maxime Marquette, columnist

Sources

Primary sources

Los Angeles Times — Trump's silent strategy: fewer ICE raids, harsher rules that squeeze immigrants nationwide — June 12, 2026

The Marshall Project — Immigrant "voluntary" departures surge; ICE detention conditions in Newark implicated — May 30, 2026

The Guardian — Living in fear of a knock on the door: Cubans expelled under Trump — June 14, 2026

Secondary sources

The Boston Globe — Trump cuts immigrants off from jobs, health care, and housing to force them out — May 30, 2026

Associated Press — Trump's deportation agenda to receive $70 billion from Congress — June 5, 2026

The Guardian — What happens when Trump drives you out of the US? The remigration ideology — June 15, 2026

Axios — Minnesota asylum approvals plummet under Trump — June 1, 2026

Ground News / Brookings Institution — US records negative net migration in 2025 for the first time in 50 years — June 3, 2026