The Department of Homeland Security has issued 103,000 civil fines to illegal immigrants who refused to comply with deportation orders since the Trump administration began. The total dollar amount on those fines is $84 billion. The rate is $998 per day for every day an illegal immigrant remains in the country after being ordered to leave.
Lauren Bis, Assistant Secretary of the DHS Office of Public Affairs, laid it out on July 23. "Under President Trump and Secretary Mullin, DHS is working faster than ever before to remove criminal illegal aliens from our country," she said. "Our message to illegal aliens is clear: LEAVE NOW. If you don't, you will face consequences." DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin has made the fines a centerpiece of the administration's enforcement-by-pressure strategy.
One illegal immigrant in Virginia who entered the country in 2016 and received a removal order in 2017 was assessed a fine of $1.8 million by DHS in February. The Legal Aid Justice Center filed a lawsuit on July 8 challenging that fine. Rohmah Javed, Director of the group's Immigrant Justice Program, called it "government intimidation." "A $1.8 million fine is not immigration enforcement," Javed said.
Which raises an interesting question about what immigration enforcement actually is, in Javed's view. Because the alternative DHS is offering isn't exactly cruel. Former DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin noted that illegal immigrants can use the CBP Home app to arrange a free flight home — and receive a $2,600 repatriation benefit for doing so. Free flight. Twenty-six hundred dollars in your pocket. Or stay, ignore the order, and watch the meter run at $998 a day.
The left-wing legal groups framing $998-a-day fines as "intimidation" have a math problem. If someone has a lawful removal order and chooses to remain, the government's options are limited to physical removal or financial consequences. The fines create a paper trail that follows the individual through every future interaction with the legal system — employment, benefits, banking, any brush with law enforcement. That trail doesn't expire.
Sen. Rick Scott, Republican of Florida, introduced the Illegal Immigration Cost Recovery Act to put additional legislative teeth behind the fining authority. "The law doesn't enforce itself," Scott said. "There must be consequences for breaking it."
The $84 billion number is almost certainly uncollectible — and everyone involved knows it. People living in the country illegally aren't writing checks to the federal government. But collectibility isn't the point. The point is that 103,000 people now carry a federal debt that doesn't go away. It accrues. It compounds. It shows up the next time they interact with any government system, anywhere.
The government has already collected about $1.1 billion in civil fine payments from illegals so maybe it is working after all.
