Why Mullin’s DHS Should Release Deportation Numbers

The Case Against Concealment

In May 2025, while the Department of Homeland Security was under the leadership of Secretary Kristi Noem, DHS established a new program to financially incentivize voluntary deportations, often referred to as remigration, offering illegal aliens a one-time $2,600 payment to self-deport through the CBP Home app. This program is similar to those in countries such as Germany, which offers migrants €3,000, France, which offers €3,500, and Sweden, which tops the list with a high incentive of €31,000. Voluntary returns are critical to the success of mass deportations, saving money, staff, and avoiding the controversy and violence that follow forced removals.

As of mid-March 2026, approximately 72,000 people had enrolled in the program to self-deport, according to a leaked internal DHS document reviewed by CNN, with half receiving funds. The profile of those enrolling in the program is primarily illegal immigrants involved in court proceedings. The program’s key impact appears to be reducing the legal backlog of cases going to the courts, through offering illegal immigrants trapped in legal purgatory an incentive to quickly and rapidly depart the country.

There is a large gap between the administration’s public discussion of the program and the reality. At its most ambitious, it has been called a “remigration” program, even as the program’s actual focus has been to reduce the court burden. There are 3.7 million pending cases in the immigration court system. The program has lessened that burden, but only just so: even 100,000 enrollments via the CBP home app would reduce the total caseload by only a few percent. The program is not successful in achieving its lesser aim of reducing pressure on courts, let alone meaningfully incentivizing return migration at scale. Unfortunately, Project Homecoming has failed because blue states offer more for illegals to stay than the red administration is paying them to leave.

To illustrate the point, a small family of illegal aliens in New York City may, over two years, receive anywhere from $3,000 – $40,000 in direct cash assistance, not even considering that taxpayers subsidize their child’s education, while being provided anywhere from $100,000 – $200,000 in indirect subsidies to house them in hotels and other emergency housing accommodations. On the other side of the country, in Seattle, direct cash subsidies are smaller – around $5,000 per year – but other forms of assistance, such as subsidized housing, medical care, and education, are similarly supportive. While illegal immigrants may illegally receive federal assistance, participating in programs such as SNAP, the primary cost is via public services provided by taxpayers, who subsidize their education and healthcare, even as migrant support groups and state governments deliver them housing. There are hundreds of thousands in subsidies, in addition to thousands in direct cash assistance, that make life for illegal aliens easy and financially lucrative. This is not to mention the simple fact that earnings for illegal aliens are much higher in the United States than in their home countries.

If Project Homecoming intends to financially incentivize remigration, the offer is too small. DHS should consider drastically increasing the payment. A more realistic, direct, one-time payment would be upwards of $40,000. In most countries, this would be equivalent to several years’ earnings, making remigration not only feasible but also lucrative. Project Homecoming could become a central pillar of mass deportation if it were scaled up and bolstered. In fact, it is possible to envision a future in which voluntary remigration, or self-deportation, is the primary means of removing non-citizens from the country.

That is the success of Sweden’s program, as its €31,000 payment has led to voluntary self-deportations accounting for the bulk of Sweden’s deportation program. Germany’s Starthilfe Plus provides further corroboration, offering much less money. Since its 2017 launch, only 50,000 migrants have accepted voluntary return payments, demonstrating that insufficiently scaled financial incentives do not produce scaled remigration. Germany’s Starthilfe Plus offers far less financial support than welfare programs, resulting in an average of only about 5,000 voluntary departures per year.

Critical to the success of a voluntary return program in the United States is offering enough financial incentives to compete with the enormous support migrants receive from blue-state governments. Combined with Vice President Vance’s efforts to crack down and punish fraud as well as continued forced removals, a bolstered Homecoming program would complete the carrot-and-stick approach to remigration. However, improvements to the program depend on acknowledging its current limitations, or at least providing a clear discussion of its limits to date.

The Missing Numbers

The Trump administration has treated the program as a success story, hoping to avoid a negative backlash from the base due to low deportation numbers. This is understandable, as the administration is under tremendous pressure to deliver. However, treating this program as a success is creating the opportunity – when deportation numbers are published – for Democrats to use the information in a demoralization campaign.

Currently, deportation numbers are in legal purgatory. DHS stopped publishing the numbers shortly into the second Trump administration, and there are now multiple lawsuits from groups ranging from the Center for Immigration Studies to the NYT seeking that data. It is inevitable that DHS, whether it wants to or not, will release the deportation data to the public; the Freedom of Information Act makes this almost certain. It is only a matter of time before the data is published, and the data will be public before the end of 2026, whether the Trump administration wants that or not. Data is already regularly leaked, but could be forced out of DHS’s hands in a lawsuit that plaintiffs are favored to win. There is an alternative to an embarrassing court loss that would give the Trump administration the opportunity to turn a story about low numbers into one about a new strategy.

Secretary Mullin has a very brief window of time to publish deportation numbers by choice and take advantage of the release for good ends, before bad actors, namely the Democrats and their fellow travelers on the “dissident right,” take advantage of the release to undermine Republican voter motivation during the midterms.

Mullin could assign blame to prior heads of DHS, and then release the data, ideally, embedded in a report with ideas, recommendations, and policies to scale up mass deportations. The key policy to include would be a much higher financial incentive for illegal immigrants to exit the country.

This would focus the conversation less on low numbers and on how the administration plans to increase them, which is preferable to an NYT exclusive designed solely to attack, demoralize, and undermine the Trump administration. This would strengthen Mullin’s hand during his tenure as DHS Secretary and significantly boost overall deportations. A much larger incentive, upwards of $40,000, would be especially appealing to recent arrivals – those who entered the country during the Biden years – as they have fewer ties to the United States. This is equivalent to 3-10 years of earnings in their home countries; it is a promise of a new life in their home countries.

At worst, this program would substantially complement forced removals (approximately 800,000), if not exceed them, in the most optimistic scenario.

Critically, the lack of data undermines the right’s ability to increase the scale and scope of deportations. For example, the lack of deportation numbers makes it difficult for the right to build pressure on fiscal conservatives to scale up the Homecoming Program: fiscal conservatives who shudder at a $40,000 check to pay people to leave can cite the administration’s own arguments against it, turning White House statements about the program’s success into a noose around scaled-up mass deportations. Why improve what’s working fine?

This strategy is deployed both against Project Homecoming and mass deportations. Fiscal conservatives can endorse mass deportations, even citing White House arguments about success, while turning this into a justification not to scale up or increase deportation efforts. Moderate Republicans find this especially attractive, offering them a way to support Trump while distancing themselves from a more aggressive immigration-enforcement agenda, which would undermine the Chamber of Commerce interests that favor cheap illegal labor.

So long as we don’t have numbers and the White House is saying positive things about the scale of mass deportations, we cannot effectively argue to scale them up. Right now, advocating for scaling up mass deportations is seen as critical of the administration, precisely because it focuses the conversation on the missing, presumably low, numbers, which Noem’s DHS unwisely removed from public view. Any conversation about scaling up must begin with the numbers: the numbers we do not have.

The missing deportation data has become a weapon against DHS and ICE, which makes it hard for allies to support the administration’s efforts to deport illegal aliens, and makes it easy for those who want to keep the numbers low to play nice with the White House. Secretary Mullin can, at any time, change this situation by releasing the data, turning a growing problem into an opportunity for more deportations.

While the White House and Secretary Mullin may be cautious about releasing the data, worrying that it could demoralize voters or feed ammunition to toxic voices online, what might make releasing the data more attractive is that the media environment has changed: many of the talking heads online that most vociferously attacked the Trump administration on low deportation numbers (Fuentes, Carlson) have clearly distanced themselves from the right and lost a huge amount of influence over the past year. The negative elements online are more contained and less powerful than ever.

Working with allied groups, such as influential leaders in Congress, TPUSA, DailyWire, and the Mass Deportation Coalition to roll the data out would greatly strengthen the administration’s hand, turning what is a painful lapse in transparency into a public relations coup for Mullin, contrasting his leadership with Noem, and giving the right a chance to capitalize on low numbers to increase the scale of deportations further via building Project Homecoming into a fully-fledged remigration program, with lucrative financial incentives for voluntary departure. Releasing the data would be the first step in reorienting DHS towards generating push factors to get illegal aliens to self-deport. If conditions are created that make it profitable to leave, more will leave than we could ever deport via arrests and forced removals.

Releasing the numbers would provide a political opportunity to fully invest in and pivot towards financial incentives for remigration as the primary immigration enforcement method. This would be an expensive program, but only in the short term. The lifetime cost of migrants from countries with poor and incompatible cultures makes $40,000 look cheap. In fact, $40,000 to leave is a good deal, even a bargain, for the United States. Forced removals could pivot to the worst of the worst, shoring up public support, even as overall deportations scale up, relying on economic push factors rather than force. Pairing a lucrative remigration program with the loss of bank access could yield large-scale returns, substantially boosting deportation numbers.

As Mullin takes over DHS, it is worth asking how much we value the future. A Somali family will cost the United States millions for generations, straining our finances and social cohesion for the rest of the nation’s history. $40,000 to have them leave seems pretty cheap. The Plan for Mullin’s DHS is simple: publish the data, incentivize voluntary return, and win.

A pivot to economic push factors is feasible; the first step would be to release the data to justify and drive the pivot. So long as the numbers are kept secret and the White House uses that secrecy to spin the numbers in its favor, the Trump administration will struggle to reduce the illegal alien population in the United States meaningfully. A short-term choice to stop publishing data has become a tool to slow and reduce mass deportations, and a way to attack DHS. Keeping the data secret looks like an admission of failure. But DHS has not failed. DHS has meaningfully increased deportations, more than any prior administration. Trump’s low numbers are higher than any other President, but they can and should be even higher.