Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has been running increasingly effective ads, urging illegal immigrants to self-repatriate (the word 'deport' is a misnomer) so that immigration enforcers don't have to come get them.
One example is here:
The ad says that those who use the CBP One app and leave the country on their own will be offered a free flight home, financial assistance up to $1,000, and a chance to return to the U.S. legally. Those who don't will be raided, forced home in prison conditions, and not be allowed back into the country.
Carrot, stick. It sounds like a fair deal for the illegal border crossers and other illegal migrants, some of whom were tricked by cartels and NGOs into thinking they were coming to the U.S. legally.
There's just one problem, though: The app isn't working and the promises made to the immigrants are not being kept.
ProPublica did an investigation and found that yes, there are some problems:
She desperately wanted to get out of the country.
It was mid-May and Pérez, a Venezuelan mother of two, couldn’t survive on her own in Chicago anymore. She’d been relying on charity for food and shelter ever since her partner had been detained by immigration authorities after a traffic stop earlier in the year.
...
Then she heard about Trump’s offer of a safe and dignified way out.
“We are making it as easy as possible for illegal aliens to leave America,” the president said in a video on social media in May announcing the launch of Project Homecoming.
He spoke about a phone app where “illegals can book a free flight to any foreign country.” And he dangled other incentives: Eligible immigrants wouldn’t be barred from returning legally to the U.S. someday, and they’d even get a $1,000 “exit bonus.” Believing the president’s words, Pérez downloaded the CBP Home app and registered to return to Venezuela with her children.
Months passed. Her partner was deported. In July, Pérez said, she got a call from someone in the CBP Home program telling her she’d be on a flight out of the country in mid-August. She began packing.
But as the departure date neared and the plane tickets hadn’t arrived, Pérez got nervous. Again and again, she called the toll-free number she’d been given. Finally, somebody called back to say there might be a delay obtaining the documents she’d need to travel to Venezuela.
Then there was silence. No further information, no plane tickets. Pérez registered on the app again in August, then a third time in September, as immigration arrests ramped up in Chicago.
Today, Pérez feels trapped in a country that doesn’t want her. She’s afraid of leaving her apartment, afraid that she will be detained and that her children will be taken away from her. “I feel so scared, always looking around in every direction,” she said. “I was trying to leave voluntarily, like the president said.”
That is some runaround, and for someone who was trying to do the right thing.
The investigative story gets worse, describing migrants who have sold their cars and given notice to their landlords on housing, only to be waiting, homeless, for the plane tickets that never arrive and the financial assistance that never comes. There's a section on difficulty obtaining travel documents that seem to be contributing to the delay. And though the report doesn't mention it, it's likely that the hideous narcogovernment of Nicolas Maduro is obstructing at least some of the return flights.
O.K., that's not Homeland Security's fault, but they still need be fair and responsible and stay in communication to those who have entered their process.
In cases of delay, where they have promised a free flight out and given a time frame, DHS should treat these migrants the same way airlines are required to treat customers whose flights are delayed, providing meals and hotels while the matter is resolved. Yes, it might mean some costs, but the agency is now well funded, and more importantly, it need to be fair to those trying to do the right thing.
The big reason for that is that their word needs to be good.
The poor migrants are stuck in a no-man's land of zero income, zero home, zero transport and zero flight date home. Nobody is looking out for them, and in the political sphere, Democrats and church bishops are beating the drum of 'dignified treatment of migrants' meaning, something like this finally gives them a live issue with which they can attack the Trump administration and call for open borders.
Why not fix the matter, and make it right with the migrants instead?
The failure of the app's promises resemble the early tech failures of Obamacare or the early failures of the CBP One app, back when it was luring the illegals in under Joe Biden.
Call it Obamatech, the tech problems associated with big government rollout programs.
If they can't fix it, they need to make it right for the migrants, exempting them from fear of deportation raids and giving them the aid they need to tide them over before their return flights home.
It's important to fix this because these are the migrants who need to be treated with kindness and consideration, the ones who should have a good experience getting home and restarted back in their home countries over the experience of the criminals going back on a repatriation flight. They should not be left in a lurch, no matter what the reason may be.
That's because among migrants, word gets around and if word gets around that the U.S.'s word is good, then many more illegals are going to go home through the app and end the migrant crisis.
If word gets around that the U.S.'s word is bad, nobody is going to bother with going home, which is a bad outcome that will serve only Democrats.
Fortunately, Noem is a fair-minded person and likely to at least see the problem with the app not working the way it is supposed to work and the promises to exiting migrants not being fulfilled.
One can only hope cracks the whip to get this done fast so people who want to go home can go home and her enforcement agencies can put all their energy into rounding up foreign criminals.
It's way better for everyone if the U.S. sticks to its promises to those migrants leaving voluntarily and gets these problems fixed asap.
Image: Screen shot from Punchbowl News video, via YouTube