The Department of Homeland Security has levied fines worth $84 billion against 103,000 illegal migrants, says the New York Times.
The project has grown rapidly since April, when the department had levied fines against at least 65,000 migrants for at least $36 billion. The fines are set at almost $1,000 per day of illegal presence.
The mailed fine notices “amount to an agonizing ultimatum: abandon the lives they have built, or face the threat of financial ruin if the government moves to collect on the debt,” said the July 22 New York Times article, which sympathizes with the illegal migrants.
The fines are part of the multifaceted campaign by President Donald Trump to implement the deportation mandate he was given in November 2024. The forced departure of economic migrants will help younger Americans win higher wages and cheaper rents and will pressure politicians and elites to sympathize with ordinary Americans instead of with employers and migrants.
But Democrats are trying to protect the illegal migrants by claiming the law only allows fines against migrants who have ignored judges’ deportation orders — or who have failed to go home after agreeing to leave — within the last five years. A July 17 letter from Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) to the White House deputies says:
The Trump Administration has abused these authorities in an attempt to frighten immigrants—many of whom are seeking a green card or who have maintained lawful presence in the United States for decades—with outrageously excessive $1.8 million penalties that are clearly intended to force them to “self-deport.”
Padilla is the U.S.-born son of an illegal Mexican migrant whose own wages dropped as more migrants flooded into California’s restaurant industry. He is also the top Democrat senator on the Senate’s judiciary committee.
“This administration is just churning out as many fines as it can to intimidate and harass people into leaving the country,” Charles Moore, a lawyer with Public Justice, a left-wing legal group, told the New York Times.
The New York Times article shows no sympathy for — or even recognition of — the many millions of ordinary Americans who have suffered painful economic and civic damage because of elite support for mass illegal migration for at least 40 years.
The article noted that the federal government is using debt-collection agencies to collect on the fines:
“We started seeing this a couple months ago, and it’s become a big trend,“ said John Leschak, an immigration lawyer in New Jersey.
…
“These are people who have homes, cars, businesses in their names,” he said. “The government says they stand to have all that confiscated.”
In May, 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.
…
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.
Pro-migration lawyers are suing to block the program, and some have helped migrants dodge the fines, the New York Times noted.
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