BOSTON – On a typical November Tuesday, approximately 20 black SUVs surrounded the Allston Car Wash on Cambridge Street in Boston. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents wearing army green bulletproof vests with the word “Police” on them swarmed the business and detained nine workers.
The employees were grabbed, often from behind while cleaning cars, and loaded into vehicles at gunpoint or while handcuffed. The workers, none of whom have a criminal record, were not given the opportunity to present their legal work authorization papers that many kept in their lockers.
After a month in detention centers across New England and Texas, the seven workers with legal work authorization were released in early December. On April 22, those seven workers filed a complaint against federal officials for unlawful detention, claiming ICE operated without a warrant and failed to verify their identities or legal statuses until after detaining them.
Of the two that remained in custody, Hector V., whose last name is omitted for privacy reasons, elected to self-deport from the South Texas ICE Processing Center at the end of January, according to his lawyer, Todd Pomerleau.
The South Texas center is overcrowded with three toilets, three showers and two urinals for 64 detainees. Inmates were served food with worms in it more than once, according to Representative Joaquin Castro (D-Tex.) who visited the facility in February. Detainees are treated like criminals, although most have no criminal record, and many remain in custody for weeks or even months after agreeing to be deported, he said.
For five months, Hector V. endured those brutal conditions before he was deported to his home country of El Salvador in mid-April, 11 weeks after electing to self-deport.
Hector V.’s case is not unique.
Pomerleau also represents Eliana G. who chose to self-deport after losing her petition for asylum in 2025. She has remained in ICE custody in Arizona and Louisiana for over seven months.
In May 2025, President Donald Trump launched “Project Homecoming,” offering free flights and a $1,000 stipend to undocumented immigrants who choose to leave the US with the promise of an easier, legal return. In January, the Department of Homeland Security raised the amount to $2,600.
With this, the estimated 11 to 14 million undocumented immigrants in the US are faced with a choice: remain in the country and risk detainment and deportation, or self-deport to their home country and the life they once left behind.
Despite the promise that “self-deport[ees] may have the opportunity to return legally in the future,” most immigrants who self-deport will be barred from returning to the US for at least three years, but up to 10 years. And those convicted of even minor crimes are permanently barred from returning, according to Boston-based immigration attorney Matt Cameron.
“If you’ve been here for over a year, you’re not going to come back for 10 years in many cases,” Cameron said. “They really don’t tell you that when you take” the deal.
In many cases, that means “a lot of people who self-deport arguably can never come back,” Pomerleau said.
This promise is a generalization that ignores the legal barriers self-deportees may face when returning to the US, Cameron and Pomerleau agreed.
The government’s assurance of an easier return “feels like a false promise” because the government is “not actually doing anything to … expedite the legal pathway” to return after self-deportation, said Mneesha Gellman, an Emerson College political science professor who routinely testifies on behalf of immigrants.
Anyone seeking to return to the US must apply through their home country’s consulate office. But Cameron said individuals will be “guaranteed a much longer wait and a lot more bureaucracy.”
“The fact that [former Secretary of Homeland Security] Kristi Noem has made some promise … does not mean that a consular officer in Brazil [for example] has any clue that that promise was even made” or any way to implement it, said Mary Holper, director of the Boston College Immigration Clinic.
The Trump Administration needs to create guidance for every consular officer in the world to make this promise legitimate, Holper added. Without formal policy, “I would be worried about [the promise] not even being justiciable” because the legal process to return happens outside of the US, she said.
For these reasons, “there is absolutely no reason to rely on that” promise, Holper said.
Legal proceedings of Hector V. and Eliana G.
People also cannot rely on a swift removal after opting to self-deport.
Hector V. immigrated to the US in November 2005. When he arrived, he was taken into ICE custody for removal hearings, but was later released on his own recognizance.
Following the Allston Car Wash raid, he remained in ICE custody because unbeknownst to him, there was an order for his removal for missing his final immigration hearing in 2007. Hector V. could not read the hearing notification because he is illiterate and was given the wrong information when someone read it to him.
Following his detainment, the court required Hector V. to appear for a bond hearing, but never scheduled it, leading Pomerleau to file a motion to hold the government in contempt of court for not following a federal court order.
Pomerleau then filed a motion to reopen his case on account of the mistreatment of his illiteracy which was denied in early January.
Hector V. chose not to appeal his case and elected to self-deport because he “didn’t want to wait in jail anymore,” Pomerleau said.
If Hector V. was not deported in mid-April, he could have remained in detention for an unknown amount of time and would not have been able to contest his detention through a habeas petition until August.
“When the government isn’t prompt in removing somebody that wishes to be removed, we have to recalibrate to see if the client wants to continue to fight to be released,” said Pomerleau. “If you’re going to stay in jail anyway, you might as well fight to get out of jail at a minimum.”
Eliana G. was detained before her court proceedings began almost eight months ago. When she lost her case for asylum, she waived her right to appeal and elected to self-deport, Pomerleau said.
After that, she no longer needed legal support and was not Pomerleau’s client anymore. However, Pomerleau did not know that Eliana G. was still in detention until Senator Elizabeth Warren emailed him about her prolonged detainment in early March.
She is still in a Louisiana detention center seven months later awaiting travel documents so she can be deported to Ecuador. Although she is originally from Honduras, the court chose Ecuador as a third-party location for deportation so she can seek asylum there. However, Eliana G. has not yet been given the opportunity to contest the court’s choice of Ecuador.
Eliana G. clearly has a strong asylum case if the US is going to send her to another country to seek asylum there, Pomerleau said.
The choice to self-deport
While some people chose to self-deport from detention centers, those not in detention are also self-deporting.
Undocumented immigrants choose to leave out of fear of never being able to return to the US if they are deported regularly, and because self-deportation “maximize[s] the chance of family wellbeing and reunification,” said Gellman, the political science professor.
Despite the possibility of family reunification, a parent choosing to self-deport often means leaving their children behind with other family members indefinitely.
For example, Eliana G.’s two children, ages 10 and 2, now live with other family members in Western Massachusetts. However, the denial of her asylum case can make returning to the US harder or illegal.
Project Homecoming is the first instance in American history that self-deportation initiatives include a promise of an easier return and a monetary incentive.
However, “the use of immigration agents to round up and send back those who are here illegally is not new to this administration,” said Vincent Cannato, associate professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Boston.
Advertisements promising that DHS “will find” and deport undocumented immigrants for Project Homecoming caused “people [to] forget that” similar deportation methods have “been going on for a while, even a hundred years ago,” Cannato added.
From 1920 to 1923, approximately 100,000 Mexican immigrants were offered a free passage of return to Mexico, according to the New York Times.
From 1929 to 1936, Mexican Repatriation raids led to the deportation of almost 2 million Mexicans and Mexican Americans. Repatriation informally continued until Mexican labor was needed during WWII.
Beginning in 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “Operation Wetback” rounded up Mexicans and Mexican Americans. An estimated 1.3 million Mexicans were deported without a formal departure order, although some historians believe the number was closer to 300,000.
“Self-deportation usually ‘works’ when there is the hand of force behind it,” such as a threat of violence, which was the case in the 1920s, or deportation and the inability to return, Cannato said.
The force can also be detainees being abused or coerced to self-deport, said Boston-based immigration attorney Jeffrey Rubin.
Clients of both Cameron and Pomerleau have self-deported without consulting them, even while they are in the middle of legal proceedings. Clients who spontaneously self-deport often do not understand the repercussions, such as the barriers to returning, which is “painful,” Cameron said.
In one case, Cameron was working to reduce the time—10 years—his client would have to return to his home country as a penalty for residing in the US illegally, before being able to apply to return legally.
Instead of waiting for the reduction or ability to remain in America during legal proceedings, the client chose to self-deport to Guatemala with his wife and now may not be able to return to the US for three or four years, Cameron said.
Cameron’s client is one of many self-deportees as well as deportees returning to unsafe countries, including Guatemala, Venezuela, and Honduras for crime or terrorism threats.
Self-deportation is “not something I would’ve previously advised people to do, but honestly, if you just want the peace of mind … of being able to come back in the future,” it is an option, Cameron said.
Since the launch of Project Homecoming, Holper said she discusses self-deportation with her detained clients at BC’s immigration clinic often.
If there’s no way for detainees to be released from detention, most “are not going to feel … they can stomach” remaining in detention and choose to self-deport instead of facing an indefinite sentence, Holper said. Immigration detention is considered an indefinite sentence because the cases are civil, not criminal, and the sentence is the often-unknown length of court proceedings.
“Up until this administration, [self-deportation] was the last ditch. It has become more and more that people are volunteering” to do so, Cameron said.
From January 2025 to January 2026, 2.2 million undocumented immigrants have self-deported, according to the DHS.
However, the Center for Migration Studies reported that 400,000 people self-deported in the last year. If more than 2 million undocumented immigrants, nearly 15% of the undocumented population in the US, left the country, the center says it would not go unnoticed.
Despite the discrepancy in metrics, Cannato said nearly a half a million self-deportations “is still significant,” especially when added to the number of traditional deportations: approximately 675,000 as of January, according to DHS.
Trump’s immigration policies are not necessarily keeping people from coming to the US illegally. Cannato said, “The more strictures that you have in terms of who can come over [the border], the more you’re going to have people going around those strictures and the more illegal immigration you’re going to have.”
