How Much Has DHS Really Spent on Self-Deportations?

The Department of Homeland Security won’t say how much money it has paid undocumented immigrants to self-deport—though the price tag is likely tens of millions of dollars.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem posted a cringey AI-generated video on X Thursday celebrating the claim that 1.6 million immigrants have self-deported. In the post, she plugged the $1,000 exit bonus the Trump administration is offering to any undocumented immigrant who chooses to leave the country.

The Trump administration had previously announced in March that it planned to bribe any undocumented immigrant who used the CBP Home app to self-deport with a free plane ticket and a “stipend of $1,000 dollars, paid after their return to their home country has been confirmed through the app.” The Trump administration has reportedly moved State Department funds earmarked for helping refugees resettle in the United States to help fund flights and stipends.

So how much money has the Trump administration spent on immigrants self-deporting? The Department of Homeland Security wouldn’t say.

In a statement Friday to The New Republic, the DHS declined to say how many immigrants had used the CBP Home to self-deport, or how much money it had distributed in stipends.

Instead, DHS claimed that “tens of thousands” of undocumented immigrants had used the CBP Home app to relocate to their home countries. “So far, tens of thousands of illegal aliens have utilized the CBP Home app, and overall 2 million illegal immigrants have left the United States since January 2025,” the department said in a statement.

When pressed for an exact number, DHS sent that portion of the statement again.

If “tens of thousands”—referring to anywhere from 20,ooo to 99,000—undocumented immigrants had actually used CBP Home to self-deport, however, the Trump administration has spent anywhere from $20 million to $99 million on stipends.

None of this includes the price of airfare, which the Trump administration has also offered to cover. The average cost of an international plane ticket is $1,217, according to FCM and Corporate Traveler, meaning that an additional $24 million to $120 million could be added to the DHS price tag.

As a result, the total estimated cost for self-deportations could be anywhere from $44 million to $219 million. These numbers are particularly distressing amid the ongoing government shutdown, as the Trump administration continues to carry out its expensive and unpopular deportation efforts while claiming it doesn’t have enough cash to feed our nation’s most vulnerable.

But crucially, the non-numbers provided by DHS don’t quite seem to add up. Customs and Border Protection reported in September that more than 5,000 immigrants had used the CBP Home app to self deport. If the DHS’s “tens of thousands” claim were possibly true, that would mean at least 15,000 additional immigrants had self-deported using the app in the last month alone.

That would be pretty incredible, considering that the CBP Home app doesn’t seem to work all that well. ProPublica reported in October that more than a dozen Venezuelans who attempted to use the program to return to Venezuela found themselves stranded in the United States.

On Friday afternoon, Donald Trump pardoned a man convicted of working as an agent for the Chinese government to intimidate a New Jersey family. 

Michael McMahon, a former New York police officer, was sentenced to 18 months in prison in April after being convicted in 2023 for acting as an unregistered agent of China, interstate stalking, and conspiracy. Federal prosecutors said that McMahon and his Chinese associates were trying to get a Chinese couple living in New Jersey to go back to China where they would be tried for corruption. 

The Justice Department said the plot was part of China’s Operation Fox Hunt, which aims to return Chinese fugitives back to their native country and helps the Chinese Communist Party control citizens living outside of the country. McMahon, however, claimed he was duped into working for China as a private investigator, and successfully lobbied several Trump associates to push his case.  

McMahon’s influence campaign included attending the president’s inauguration in January and getting the support of Republican Representative Mike Lawler and Trump associate Roger Stone, himself a recipient of a Trump pardon in 2020. 

An anonymous White House official claimed to The New York Times that McMahon was the victim of a flawed trial and tricked into participating by a person who told him it was an investigation into embezzlement from a construction company. The official said that, unbeknownst to McMahon, he was actually hired by Chinese spies. 

Trump’s pardons seem to either be based on political loyalty, like his pardon of January 6 rioters on his first day in office, or raise questions of corruption and influence peddling. Last month, he pardoned Changpeng Zhao, a crypto billionaire, and soon afterwards Zhao cut a business deal with the Trump family. It seems that there is no crime too big for the supposed law-and-order president. 

Alexander Smirnov, the ex–FBI informant who admitted to lying about the Biden-Burisma connection, has been released from prison just months into his six-year prison sentence.

In a plea deal in December 2024, Smirnov admitted to completely fabricating the conspiracy that became central to a Republican effort to impeach then-President Joe Biden. Days later, the Russian asset pleaded guilty to four felony charges, including one count of obstruction, and was sentenced to six years in prison.

But the U.S.-Israeli citizen has been missing for at least four months from the low-security Los Angeles prison he was relegated to, according to investigative reporter Jacqueline Sweet.

Smirnov is still listed as a prisoner at FCI Terminal Island in Los Angeles, where his anticipated release date is February 2029, according to the Bureau of Prisons. But a process server responsible for handing off details of a civil lawsuit to Smirnov was unable to find him at the facility.

An employee at the prison confirmed to the process server that while “Smirnov is affiliated with the facility,” he was “not currently housed there,” reported Sweet on Friday.

“I was advised to call back in approximately 15 days, as [Smirnov] may or may not return to the facility by that time. The representative was notably guarded and provided minimal information beyond that,” read an email from the server, obtained by Sweet.

After months of failed attempts to find and locate Smirnov, the local Sheriff’s Department managed to receive a clearer response from the facility.

“They’ve confirmed that Mr. Smirnov has been furloughed, but no forwarding or new address has been provided,” the message read.

In June 2020, Smirnov falsely reported to the FBI that Burisma executives had paid Biden and his son Hunter millions of dollars. The fake claim was part of a larger series of unfounded allegations that accused Biden of improperly leveraging his position as vice president (at the time) to prevent a corruption investigation into Burisma, on whose board Hunter sat.

The fraudulent tale also sparked an October surprise in the 2020 election about Hunter Biden’s laptop, which Trump allies Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon insisted contained evidence that Biden and a Burisma adviser had held a “meeting.” (The New York Post, which ran the original story on its front page, later said that the contents of the laptop were mixed with fake material and that most of the data could not be verified.)

The Justice Department revealed in February 2024 that Smirnov admitted to prosecutors that “officials associated with Russian intelligence were involved” in developing the Hunter Biden narrative.

In the ensuing fallout over the DOJ indictment, Smirnov told investigators he was in contact with “four different [top] Russian officials,” two of whom were the “heads of the entities they represent.”

Smirnov’s smattering of international affiliations makes the convicted felon a significant flight risk—but another possibility of freedom may await the foreign asset. Earlier this year, the DOJ filed a joint motion alongside Smirnov’s attorneys to release him pending appeal. U.S. District Judge Otis Wright tossed that effort in April, but legal experts stress that the effort could be an early sign that the Trump administration is considering pardoning Smirnov, as “it is almost unheard of for the DOJ to argue for someone’s release pending appeal.”

“I can’t say for sure based on the information I have that a pardon deal is in the works,” Oregon criminal defense attorney Bear Wilner-Nugent told Sweet. “But if one were, this is what it could look like. I can say that this is an extraordinarily concerning way for the government to be treating someone when they’re already accused of improper connections with him.”

President Trump is rejecting visas for fat people.

The Trump administration has ordered visa officers to deny immigrants who are obese or have certain health issues, in yet another instance of the president’s strange obsession with fat people.

A Thursday directive from the State Department, sent to embassies and consulates around the world, indicates that people applying for visas to the United States may be rejected if they have certain medical conditions, on the grounds that they could take up domestic health care resources.

“You must consider an applicant’s health,” the cable read. “Certain medical conditions—including, but not limited to, cardiovascular diseases, respiratory diseases, cancers, diabetes, metabolic diseases, neurological diseases, and mental health conditions—can require hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of care.”

The announcement then goes on to mention obesity, stating that it can be connected to asthma, sleep apnea, and high blood pressure.

“All of these can require expensive, long-term care,” the cable continues. “Does the applicant have adequate financial resources to cover the costs of such care over his entire expected lifespan without seeking public cash assistance or long-term institutionalization at government expense?”

Denying fat people from the U.S. because they might end up having health issues is incredibly broad, cruel, and unusual. Visa applicants are already subjected to health screenings for infectious diseases like tuberculosis and are required to have various vaccinations.

“Taking into consideration one’s diabetic history or heart health history—that’s quite expansive,” immigration lawyer Sophia Genovese told the Los Angeles Times. “There is a degree of this assessment already, just not quite expansive as opining over, ‘What if someone goes into diabetic shock?’ If this change is going to happen immediately, that’s obviously going to cause a myriad of issues when people are going into their consular interviews.”

This announcement comes just one day after Trump announced his “fat shot” deal with two pharmaceutical companies to lower the cost of popular weight-loss drugs Ozempic and Zepbound to around $150 per month (they currently cost around $350 per month).

Trump also took time out of Thursday’s announcement to reveal exactly who was taking the weight-loss drug, outing longtime comms staffer and attack dog Steven Cheung.

“Where’s Steve? Is he here? Head of public relations for the White House? He’s taking it.”

Donald Trump is apparently not the point person on his own administration’s policy.

In the past 24 hours, the president has repeatedly deferred questions about the mechanics of his government to his foot soldiers, deflecting the responsibilities and duties that he campaigned three times (and at one point allegedly conspired) to acquire.

During an Oval Office press briefing Friday, Trump called on his press secretary Karoline Leavitt to answer a question about rising prices and affordability in his stead.

“We did a great job on groceries and affordability. The only problem is the fake news, you people don’t want to report it. And in fact, I’d like to ask Karoline—where’s Karoline? I’d like to ask Karoline a question,” Trump said.

But Leavitt was outside the room.

“She deserted me,” Trump wailed to laughter from the room, but eventually she returned.

“Karoline, could you discuss that question that was asked and how it was asked in such a fake, disgusting manner by the fake news?” Trump said.

“Yeah, I just saw.… Very unfortunate that the reporter refused to address, sir, what you just said,” Leavitt said, beginning a long scolding for the attending media outlets. “Which is that you inherited the worst inflation crisis in modern American history and you are fixing it in 10 short months, and your entire administration has been tasked with this effort.”

The relationship between Trump and Leavitt seems to be backward: Leavitt is supposed to elevate Trump’s original positions as his press secretary, not the other way around. But it’s not even the first instance this week in which Trump has opted out of functioning as the president.

During a White House meeting with Central Asian leaders Thursday night, a sleepy Trump tapped Vice President JD Vance to speak in his stead on the topic of Kazakhstan joining the Abraham Accords—though that may have actually saved face for the administration, since the president clearly doesn’t know how to pronounce Kazakhstan.

Cornell University has completely bent the knee to the Trump administration, making massive cultural and financial concessions in the process so it can get federal funding back.

On Friday, the university announced that it will pay the Trump administration $30 million over three years for reasons unspecified. It will also invest $30 million in “programs that incorporate AI and robotics, such as Digital Agriculture and Future Farming Technologies.”

Aside from those millions of dollars it’s shelling out, Cornell has agreed to hold “annual surveys to evaluate the campus climate for Cornell students, including the climate for students with shared Jewish ancestry,” to seek out “experts on laws and regulations regarding sanctions enforcement, anti-money laundering, and prevention of terrorist financing,” and hand over “anonymized” undergraduate admissions data directly to the federal government.

The agreement will also see Cornell provide staff with Attorney General Pam Bondi’s “Guidance for Recipients of Federal Funding Regarding Unlawful Discrimination,” an anti-woke catchall memo designed to force universities to broadly pull back any kind of diversity, equity, and inclusion–adjacent policy and make culture-war-obsessed right wingers feel better about themselves.

Bondi’s memo declares that “using race, sex, or other protected characteristics for employment, program participation, resource allocation, or other similar activities, opportunities, or benefits, is unlawful.” It additionally bans race-based scholarships, trans people in collegiate sports, and cultural training of any kind.

“The months of stop-work orders, grant terminations, and funding freezes have stalled cutting-edge research, upended lives and careers, and threatened the future of academic programs at Cornell,” university President Michael Kotlikoff wrote in an email to the student body.

This extortion is a result of a monthslong, all-out crackdown on universities and any speech that the Trump administration deems left-wing. Dangling federal funding in the face of schools unless they cave to very narrow, very biased demands will only lead to suppression and resentment.

Donald Trump and his administration may be absent from COP30 climate talks in Belém, Brazil, but its attendees didn’t forget about him.

Several heads of state made speeches at the conference calling out the president by name, including many from South America. Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who compared Trump to Hitler at the U.N. earlier this year, said “Mr. Trump is against humankind,” while Chile’s president Gabriel Boric took aim at the president’s climate denialism.

“That is a lie,” Boric said about Trump calling climate change a “con job” and a “hoax made up by people with evil intentions.”

“We might have legitimate discussions about how to face these things, but we cannot deny them,” added Boric.

Some alluded to Trump without mentioning his name. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s president and a target of Trump’s ire, criticized “extremist forces that fabricate fake news on climate for political gain, while French President Emmanuel Macron urged his fellow leaders to “support free and independent science.”

“We must choose multilateralism over isolationism, science over ideology, and action over fatalism,” Macron added. Paris was the location of a landmark climate deal 10 years ago, agreed to by 200 nations including the U.S. under President Obama, only for Trump to withdraw during his first term as president.

Joe Biden’s election and re-entry into the agreement was short-lived with Trump’s reelection, and the MAGA Republican surprised nobody by immediately undoing many of his predecessor’s climate efforts. Now, the U.S. under Trump refuses to be a part of climate solutions, while the rest of the world is still trying to mitigate the crisis.

President Donald Trump’s administration claims that its military strikes on foreign vessels that are allegedly smuggling drugs have targeted “unlawful combatants” engaged in an “armed conflict.” But the Associated Press reported Friday that this isn’t entirely true.

Since the beginning of September, the Pentagon has announced 17 military strikes against vessels around Latin America, summarily executing more than 66 alleged drug smugglers. The Trump administration has essentially declared war against foreign cartels it claims are“nonstate armed groups,” asserting that their transport of drugs constituted “an armed attack against the United States.”

But a handful of dead men identified by the AP weren’t so-called “narco-terrorists” or members of criminal gangs or cartels. And they were smuggling cocaine, not synthetic opioids responsible for killing tens of thousands of Americans every year.

One man killed in the first strike was Luis “Che” Martínez, a 60-year-old local crime boss who had previously been jailed for human trafficking charges. Although the Trump administration claimed that the 11 men killed were members of Tren de Aragua, Martinez’s relatives told AP that they did not believe he was a member of that gang.

Another man killed in a U.S. military strike on a vessel was Robert Sánchez, a 41-year-old fisherman and skilled boat pilot from a Venezuelan peninsula plagued by poverty. Despite the Trump administration’s claim that it was preventing the imminent transit of deadly drugs to the United States, the coastal area in Venezuela where Sánchez lived was a popular transit hub for cocaine headed for Europe. Cocaine, and other drugs bound for the United States, are typically moved through the Pacific Ocean.

Another man killed was Juan Carlos “El Guaramero” Fuentes, who’d turned to smuggling after the public bus he operated broke down and the government failed to fix it. Another was Dushak Milovcic, a 24-year-old drop-out of Venezuela’s National Guard Academy. Neither of them were gang members, either.

The AP’s latest findings are in line with previous disturbing admissions from the Pentagon, which told lawmakers that “they do not need to positively identify individuals on the vessel to do the strikes,” and “could not satisfy the evidentiary burden” required to detain or prosecute crew members. The Pentagon also admitted that the only drug targeted in the strike was cocaine, “a facilitating drug of fentanyl.”

The Trump administration has claimed the strikes are an effort to curb drug smuggling. The government is also making plans to possibly expand its campaign to dry land—and its list of potential targets reportedly includes Venezuelan military sites.

Vice President JD Vance is blatantly attacking the Constitution’s separation of powers after a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to fully fund the Supplemental Assistance Nutrition Program.

Speaking in the White House Thursday, Vance called the ruling “absurd,” because “you have a federal judge effectively telling us what we have to do in the midst of the Democrat government shutdown.”

“What we’d like to do is to have the Democrats open up the government, of course, then we can fund SNAP, and we can also do a lot of other good things for the American people,” Vance said. “But in the midst of a shutdown, we can’t have a federal court telling the president how he has to triage the situation.”

It’s yet another attack on an independent judiciary from the White House, and came hours before the administration appealed the judge’s ruling Friday, with Justice Department lawyers asking for a pause.

U.S. District Judge John McConnell’s decision “has thrust the Judiciary into the ongoing shutdown negotiations and may well have the effect of extending the lapse in appropriations, exacerbating the problem that the court was misguidedly trying to mitigate,” DOJ lawyers argued. “This unprecedented injunction makes a mockery of the separation of powers. Courts hold neither the power to appropriate nor the power to spend.”

“There is no lawful basis for an order that directs USDA to somehow find $4 billion in the metaphorical couch cushions,” the lawyers wrote. Meanwhile, as the Trump administration refuses to fund a food program for the destitute, they continue to bail out foreign countries and make record military purchases, even as the government shutdown costs the U.S. billions of dollars. But apparently, it’s all the fault of Democrats and meddlesome judges.

Representative Elise Stefanik announced her New York gubernatorial campaign early Friday, though she may not have let her team know.

The Trump loyalist’s website was still plastered in “lorem ipsum” placeholder text by the time she shared the link to her X account. But eagle-eyed critics noticed that wasn’t the only mistake on the half-baked project.

The website was also riddled with basic grammatical errors, espousing classic American values such as “family first trust,”  “will alternative,” and “legacy planningegal issues.”

In announcing her bid for the 2026 race, Stefanik slammed New York’s current leader, Kathy Hochul, as the “worst governor in America.”

“Under her failed leadership, New York is the most unaffordable state in the nation with the highest taxes, highest energy, utilities, rent, and grocery bills,” Stefanik alleged. 

“When New Yorkers were looking for leadership from our Governor, she bent the knee to the raging Defund the Police, Tax Hiking Communist causing catastrophe for New York families,” she continued, referring to New York City’s Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, who received more than 50 percent of the citywide vote Tuesday, despite the White House’s best efforts to derail his campaign.

Yet Stefanik’s apparent detestation of the democratic socialist didn’t stop her from taking a page out of Mamdani’s playbook. The top-ranking New York Republican very clearly peeled lessons from the 34-year-old’s wildly popular platform, fixating her messaging on affordability—one of Mamdani’s major policy points.

“I am running for Governor to make New York affordable and safe FOR ALL,” Stefanik wrote. “FIRE HOCHUL. SAVE NEW YORK.”

Hochul took the reins of New York in 2021 after ex-Governor Andrew Cuomo was forced out of Albany by two egregious scandals of his own making: allegations of sexual harassment from more than a dozen of his own staffers, and an enormous cover-up of Covid-19-related nursing home deaths.

A year later, New Yorkers seemed to warm up to their unanticipated leader. Hochul won the 2022 election by more than 370,000 votes, or 7 percent of the electorate, against Republican gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin, who now serves as Donald Trump’s administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency.  

Hochul has not yet announced whether she plans to run for another term, but Stefanik would need an explosive campaign to win over Republican and Democratic voters to thwart the incumbent.

Stefanik has drawn national attention in recent years, expediently ascending the rungs of the Republican Party since she went all in on the MAGA movement. She wasn’t always in the president’s pocket, however. When Trump first ran for president, Stefanik expressed that she believed his language and behavior toward women was “offensive” and “just wrong.”