A growing number of illegal migrants are smuggling themselves out of the United States to avoid the legal penalties of government deportations, according to multiple witnesses.
“I’ve been a journalist for more than 25 years, but I never thought I would see this — ‘paquetes de retorno’” said Alfredo Corchado, an American journalist in Texas and Mexico and an executive editor at the Puente News Collaborative.
On March 26 he told an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations:
[Coyotes] are now offering packages where [migrant] people can go back home …. [If] you want to go home, or you want to go back to Honduras, or maybe you don’t want to go back to Honduras because it’s too dangerous. [Or] you don’t want to go to Guatemala, but maybe you want to go to Costa Rica, and so they’re offering these [smuggling] packages where you can just go back home. Not all of them are taking it, I mean, many [are].
If migrants are deported by the United States government, they are separated from their families and detained in crowded jails, sometimes for many weeks. Once legally deported, migrants cannot visit for 10 years or longer, even when their relatives remain in the United States. They also lose possessions and easy access to their bank accounts.
Haitians “are self-deporting right now because they don’t want the worst thing … because [the government] does send them back to Haiti immediately,” Jeff Lamour, an American businessman in Albertville, Alabama, told Breitbart News on Friday.
Many Haitians have moved to Albertville for jobs once held by Americans in the chicken slaughterhouses. They got work permits from Biden’s deputies but are now losing them to Trump’s pro-American policies.
Lamour added:
This [self-deporting] industry with the coyotes, it has become a multi-million dollar industry over here now. You got those guys that are going from Indiana, from Alabama, in those vans where they’re smuggling people to New Mexico, to border states.
They’re making a ton of money. If they go deposit money at the bank, it’s going to raise a red flag. You know, I had a gentleman a couple days ago trying to buy a car with cash, straight cash. He just don’t know what to do with it because he has a lot of cash from the shuttle industry.
Smugglers “charge them $10,000 per head because a lot of people that are working are saving their money,” Lamour told told 1819News.com. “A lot of people are going back to Chile,” where they were living before Biden opened the border.
Other Haitians are going into hiding, for example, by selling their cars to minimize the chance of any interaction with local police, he said:
I sell cars for a living. I have my mechanic sitting next to me right there. He can tell you, as my witness — did we not have a guy come over here, return his car, because he’s scared to be deported? I had guys selling their car for $500 just so they won’t be deported. We see that every day.
One local migrant “crossed from Brazil all the way to the United States,” Lamour told Breitbart News, adding:
His wife and kids died in the [Darien Gap], and he had to leave them behind because he had to survive and save himself. Once he arrived in Mexico, he had to literally stay at the gay bathhouse [to avoid robbers, before he] made it over here through a Catholic charity.
So far, the exit numbers are small compared to the resident population of roughly 18 million illegal migrants, of whom roughly 9 million were invited by President Joe Biden’s deputies.
The New York Times acknowledged the trend:
Since arriving in Denver in 2023, Cristian, 29, has delivered meals and worked on construction sites. (Like other migrants I interviewed, he worried that immigration agents would find him and spoke on the condition that I identify him only by his given name.) He sends money to his wife and children in Venezuela. Cristian does not have any tattoos, a customary gang indicator, he said. He possesses a work permit and an active asylum application, which theoretically protects him from imminent deportation.
But the enforcement climate since Trump took office has changed Cristian’s calculus “360 degrees,” he told me. With the help of an American friend who escorted him to several immigration offices, he made an appointment to appear before a judge today so he could request a voluntary departure from the United States. (Immigrants who receive formal permission to leave have an easier time returning later.)
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A family in Chicago recently left for Mexico, according to their lawyer. People have abandoned Springfield, Ohio — the town where Trump claimed Haitians were eating their pets — employers there told me. Others are contemplating leaving from elsewhere, like Houston.
South of the border, northbound migrants are also turning back homewards. “It is true that people are going different directions,” Caleb Vitello, a senior official in Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, told the Council on Foreign Relations. For example, the northward foot and boat traffic in the dangerous Darien Gap between Colombia and Panama has dropped “because people aren’t risking that walk or that dangerous journey through there,” he said.
The migrants’ exit is bad news for business groups who want more imported customers, workers, and renters to increase their profits and stock values.
“The only way that we continue to grow economically is actually by increasing our levels of immigration,” said Andrea Flores, the vice-president for lobbying at FWD.us, a lobby group for West Coast investors in the consumer economy. Flores told the CFR event:
I think some of the inquiries I get most around the country are not from the border [area] and not from major urban areas. It’s from places like Nebraska [where] I routinely will get outreach from, saying, “How do we push for getting us elder care workers, childcare workers? How do we get some restaurant workers to revitalize some of our small towns? … So I’m very pro [asking] “Why don’t we offer, you know, English language courses? Why does the federal government provide that? How do you help facilitate a new immigrant’s arrival so they don’t create the type of social challenges [for] any country facing increased immigration?”
But the promise of cheap labor is “a drug that too many American firms got addicted to … [and] globalization’s hunger for cheap labor is a problem precisely because it’s been bad for innovation,” Vice President JD Vance told an audience of investors in mid-March. “Real innovation makes us more productive, but it also, I think, dignifies our workers. It boosts our standard of living. It strengthens our workforce and the relative value of its labor.”
“I can argue, in the developed countries, the big winners are the countries that have shrinking populations,” BlackRock founder Larry Fink said at a 2024 pro-globalist event hosted by the World Economic Forum in Saudi Arabia.
Fink continued:
That’s something that most people never talked about. We always used to think shrinking population is a cause for negative [economic] growth. But in my conversations with the leadership of these large, developed countries [such as China and Japan] that have xenophobic anti-immigration policies, they don’t allow anybody to come in — [so they have] shrinking demographics — these countries will rapidly develop robotics and AI and technology …
“If a promise of all that transforms productivity, which most of us think it will [emphasis added] — we’ll be able to elevate the standard living in countries, the standard of living for individuals, even with shrinking populations,” Fink said.
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