The Trump administration’s new immigration strategy is less visible but more pervasive — cutting housing, licenses, loans, and services to pressure immigrants into leaving on their own.
A Strategy Built on Silence
When Markwayne Mullin appeared before the Senate in March 2026 for his confirmation hearing as the new Secretary of Homeland Security, he made a revealing promise. “My goal in six months is that we’re not in the lead story every single day,” he said.
It was an unusually candid admission of a strategic shift that immigration attorneys, advocates, and communities across the country are already feeling on the ground. The era of dramatic Home Depot parking lot raids and mass citywide surges is giving way to something less photogenic — and in many ways more dangerous.
The administration is still deporting nearly 1,000 people a day, many with no criminal record. But alongside that machinery, a second strategy is accelerating: not removing immigrants by force, but making life in the United States so difficult, so frightening, and so restricted that people choose to leave on their own. The policy has a name. It is called self-deportation. And it has deep, dark roots in American history.
What Self-Deportation Looks Like in 2026
In the past few months alone, the following has happened — largely without the headlines that a dramatic raid would generate:
The Department of Housing and Urban Development proposed a rule that would bar “mixed-status” families from federally subsidized housing. If finalized, an estimated 80,000 people could lose their homes — including roughly 37,000 children, nearly all of them US citizens.
Starting in March, approximately 200,000 immigrants began losing their commercial driver’s licenses under a new ban targeting truckers who are asylum seekers, refugees, or recipients of DACA — people brought to this country as children. These are people with jobs, families, and lives built around their ability to work legally.
The Trump administration has reportedly weighed an order requiring banks to verify their customers’ immigration status — a move that would effectively cut off millions of people from the basic financial system.
Noncitizens — including many here legally — can no longer obtain small business loans through the federal government.
Stephen Miller has been personally lobbying Republican-led states to cut off services, including asking Texas lawmakers why they have not already passed a bill ending public school funding for undocumented children.
The Department of Homeland Security now offers $2,600 — more than double last year’s amount — to any immigrant who agrees to leave the country voluntarily, along with a free flight home. “Home is just a few clicks away!” DHS posted on social media.
None of these measures involve a single ICE agent showing up at a door. All of them are designed to make the same point: there is no stable life for you here.
This Is Not New — It Is a Playbook With a Long and Ugly History
The idea of pressuring immigrants to leave by making their lives intolerable is not a Trump invention. It is, as historian Adam Goodman documents in The Deportation Machine, a strategy that has been used by American governments for over a century.
In the late 1800s, state and local officials on the West Coast passed laws designed to drive out Chinese immigrants — denying them access to hospitals and public schools, banning their cultural practices. When those measures proved insufficient, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Racial terror followed: businesses and homes burned, mob violence in at least 168 communities in a single two-year period. Many Chinese residents still refused to leave.
During the Great Depression, local officials across the country blamed Mexican Americans for unemployment and conducted sweeps designed to terrify people into departing. A local immigration director in Los Angeles explained the strategy plainly at the time: build enough fear, and people will leave on their own, saving the government the cost and effort of formal removal. Between 1929 and 1939, at least half a million people left — including many who were US citizens.
In 1994, California passed Proposition 187, barring hospitals and schools from serving undocumented immigrants. In 2010, Arizona passed a law explicitly designed around what lawmakers called “attrition through enforcement” — a legal phrase for self-deportation. The architect of both efforts, Kris Kobach, called his approach “a more humane way” to reduce the undocumented population, because the government would not need to remove anyone “at gunpoint.”
The current administration is operating from that same playbook, now with federal power behind it, applied nationally, at a scale and intensity that exceeds anything that came before.
Does It Work? Only Partly — and at Great Cost to Everyone
The honest answer, supported by decades of evidence, is that self-deportation campaigns do not achieve their stated goals. They move some people. They terrify many more. And they cause damage that spreads far beyond the people being targeted.
A CNN investigation last month found that only 72,000 people had taken the administration’s financial incentive to self-deport — nowhere near the 2.2 million the administration had projected. This is consistent with historical patterns. Nearly half of the country’s undocumented immigrants have lived here for two decades or more. More than 30 percent own their homes. The harder it becomes to cross the border, the less likely many are to leave — because they fear they won’t be able to return.
What self-deportation campaigns do succeed at is something more troubling. They drive people underground. Parents stop sending children to school. Families stop seeking medical care — including vaccinations that protect entire communities. People drive without licenses or insurance. Workers are too afraid to report wage theft, workplace accidents, or domestic violence. The fear, once unleashed, does not stay contained to its intended targets.
It spreads to US citizens in mixed-status families. It reaches green card holders who are now advised by their attorneys to carry extra documentation when they travel. It touches naturalized citizens who are profiled based on their appearance. As the New York Times reported this week, the Supreme Court’s recent decisions now permit racial and ethnic profiling in immigration enforcement — something that, by definition, affects millions of people who have every legal right to be here.
“Some people more risk-averse will leave, and the ones who stay will be terrified,” said K-Sue Park, a law professor at UCLA. “They won’t be able to do anything. They won’t even attempt to exercise any of the rights they might exercise.”
What This Means for Your Family Right Now
If you are an immigrant in Texas — documented or undocumented, with a visa or a green card, with a pending case or a final order — the current environment requires you to be informed and prepared.
Know your rights. The Fourth Amendment protects everyone on US soil from unlawful searches and seizures, regardless of immigration status. You are not required to open your door to an ICE agent without a judicial warrant signed by a judge. An administrative warrant — the kind ICE often carries — does not give agents the right to enter your home.
Know what is changing. The policies described in this article — housing restrictions, license bans, loan cutoffs — are real, they are moving fast, and they affect people with all kinds of immigration status, not just those who are undocumented. Stay informed. Read the news. Talk to an attorney if your situation is affected.
Document everything. If you are in removal proceedings, have a pending application, or have any interaction with immigration authorities, keep records of every communication, every notice, every appointment.
Do not make decisions based on fear alone. Self-deportation is, at its core, a fear campaign. Its goal is to make you feel that leaving is your only option before you have consulted with an attorney and understood what options actually exist. Many people who feel they have no choice actually do. A consultation with an experienced immigration attorney costs far less — in every sense — than a decision made under pressure.
Powers Law Group Is Here
At Powers Law Group, we have been watching these developments closely — and helping clients navigate them every day. Whether you are facing a housing issue tied to your immigration status, a license or employment problem, a pending removal case, or simply trying to understand how the current environment affects your family’s future, our team is here to give you real answers.
Do not let fear make your decisions. Contact Powers Law Group today to schedule a consultation.
Sources
- Jia Lynn Yang, The Next Phase of the Immigration Crackdown Is Quieter — and More Destabilizing, The New York Times, April 10, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com
- Adam Goodman, The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Expelling Immigrants, Princeton University Press, 2020.
- Beth Lew-Williams, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America, Harvard University Press, 2018.
- CNN, Only 72,000 Have Taken Trump’s Self-Deportation Financial Incentive, March 2026. https://www.cnn.com
- American Immigration Council, The History of Self-Deportation Policy in the United States, 2024. https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org
- ACLU, Know Your Rights: What to Do If ICE Comes to Your Home, 2025. https://www.aclu.org
- National Immigration Law Center, Federal Housing and Immigration Status: What the Proposed HUD Rule Means, 2026. https://www.nilc.org
- KFF Health News, Immigration Enforcement and Public Health: The Hidden Costs of Fear, 2026. https://www.kff.org
- TRAC Immigration, ICE Arrests by Criminal Record — Monthly Data, 2026. https://trac.syr.edu
- Powers Law Group, ICE Is Being Sued, Questioned by Its Own Allies, and Still Arresting People With No Criminal Record, April 2026. https://www.rubypowerslaw.com
