The Donald Trump administration has begun offering migrant children, including five-year-olds, $3000 for voluntary departure from the US. According to Bloomberg, such offers, as lawyers and human rights advocates claim, come from ICE officers and immigration judges and may be accompanied by a demand to give up an asylum application.
About the Bloomberg report, The Insider writes. According to lawyers, this concerns not only officers of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), but also immigration judges.
Shaina Aber, head of the Acacia Center for Justice, said that over the past month there have been reports from different states about such offers, including to children without a lawyer. According to her, judges sometimes require an immediate decision and offer to give up the right to seek asylum in exchange for money.
Michael Lukens, director of the Washington-based Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, said that his organization and colleagues across the country have received letters from ICE lawyers offering children a “$3000 incentive”. This week, he said, such a letter arrived in the case of his 11-year-old client.
CBP border authorities are already paying $3000 for self-deportation through the CBP Home app, but lawyers had not previously heard of this practice being extended in courts to children under 14. According to the Justice Department, as of July more than 16,500 unresolved cases of unaccompanied children remained in immigration courts, and delays for filing asylum applications are limited to 21 days.
In July, federal funding for legal organizations representing such children expired. In May, the Brookings Institution estimated that due to mass deportations under Trump, about 145,000 children with U.S. citizenship were separated from at least one parent, and from January 2025 to April 2026 ICE detained about 400,000 foreigners, of whom 36% of the affected children were under six years old.
Sources
