Administration officials are quietly using debt collection companies to enforce huge fines on migrants who have ignored judges’ orders to leave the United States.
Since January 2025, the Department of Homeland Security has levied fines against at least 65,000 migrants for at least $36 billion. Nationwide, roughly 1.5 million migrants have been ordered home but have not left.
Lawyers opposing the program will ask a Massachusetts judge on May 13 to halt the fines.
AZMirror reported the debt-collection notice sent to a landscaper who crossed into the United States 20 years ago:
Sanchez was already nervous about receiving a letter from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, but nothing could prepare him for seeing the dollar amount the government said he owed them: $1,820,252.00
The Cuban landscaper, who came to the United States with his family 20 years ago, was floored. The Arizona Mirror isn’t identifying Sanchez by his full name because he fears he will be retaliated against for speaking out.
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Sanchez’s case is one of thousands across the country where DHS is charging immigrants $998 a day for staying in the country. The fines can be levied for a maximum of five years, and that’s what’s happening to Sanchez and the others, who all have been saddled with the same $1.8 million fine.
The fines grow by roughly $1,000 per day per person.
The fines are part of the multifaceted campaign by President Donald Trump to implement the deportation mandate he was given in November 2024. The departure of the foreign economic migrants will help younger Americans win higher wages and cheaper rents, and will pressure politicians to help Americans instead of migrants.
The migrant departure will also pressure companies to divert some of their profits to buy the high-tech workplace equipment that helps Americans earn higher wages by getting work done each shift and help America compete against foreign rivals, such as China.
Democrats oppose the enforcement measures, which likely will reduce the number of poor migrant clients for their taxpayer-funded urban political machines.
“It seems to me it’s just another tactic by the Trump administration to make people’s lives miserable,” Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) told ABC7 in San Diego. “You can imagine the horror when you get a notice of a potential fine like that, especially in this day and age when most working families are struggling to get by.”
Immigration lawyers are fighting the Trump policy, which could reduce revenue for migration lawyers. “People are rightfully nervous,” migration lawyer Hasan Shafiqullah told the site.
“This is part and parcel [of] the administration’s desire to partner with the private sector to make immigration enforcement as punitive and painful as possible,” said Charles Moore, an attorney at Public Justice, told the far-left LeverNews.com site, which added that four debt-collection companies are involved.
One site, NoImmigrationFines.org, is operated by the far-left Center for Constitutional Rights, New York University’s Immigrant Rights Clinic, and the open-borders Free Migration Project. The site recognizes the fines are legal, and displays some of the notices sent by debt-collection agencies to migrants.
The site also describes how migrants can object to the legal fines in the hope that sympathetic judges will delay or override the administration’s fines until after the 2028 federal election. For example, it suggests that migrants claim:
The Notice violates my Seventh Amendment right to trial by jury by imposing civil penalties intended to punish me, and by doing so without a jury trial about whether I am liable for knowingly violating the law.
DHS is intentionally inflicting emotional distress on me through the Notice, by levying excessive, punitive, and grossly disproportionate Fines against me, and doing so with all the constitutional violations that I have listed here.
If DHS decides to fine me anyway, in spite of all the things I have said here, then the fines should be minimal because of mitigating factors in my case.
“I was never warned that I might face Fines like these,” says another suggestion.
ABC7 in San Diego described a second case of a house cleaner in San Diego, California:
“It was a shock,” she said. “When I started reading and I see the amount – $1,820,000 – it was kind of insane.”
She said she came to the U.S. from Mexico decades ago, when she was around 13 years old. She is undocumented and a judge issued her an order of voluntary departure – requiring her to leave the U.S. – in 2003. But she said she didn’t know about that order for a decade, until immigration agents came to find her in 2013, at which point she said she began the process to adjust her status.
“A pending green card application does not give someone legal status to be in our country,” a DHS spokesperson told ABC7. “The Trump administration is not going to ignore the rule of law.”
DHS is rebutting complaints about the law.
“DHS is encouraging illegal aliens to voluntarily depart using the CBP Home app, which allows them to fly home for free and receive a $2,600 stipend, while preserving the option to return the legal, right way,” said a DHS statement. “Illegal aliens who do not depart will face fines of $1,000 per day, as well as arrest and deportation without return.”
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