An increasing number of immigrants without legal status — even some who have lived here for decades — are finding it easier to seek opportunities in other countries than to stay in the U.S. amid threats of detention and deportation.

“This has never happened in our country before. We have had periods of voluntary departure, but not self-deportations under pressure like this,” said Muzaffar Chishti, an attorney and policy expert at the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank.

In a June report Chishti wrote for the institute, he said the “self-deportation” strategy by the Trump administration is perhaps an acknowledgement that its goal of 1 million deportations a year “might be impossible through immigration enforcement alone, no matter how muscular.”

Immigration arrests fell in August compared with July and have not been close to a stated administration goal of 3,000 a day.

It’s hard to document how many immigrants might be choosing to leave under pressure from the Trump administration. Thousands have shown a new interest in leaving on social media, in court and through a new government app offering a plane ticket and $1,000 for those without legal immigration status. Trump officials have touted a drop in the immigrant population this year as a sign of success, but researchers say fear of responding to surveys may play a role in the data.

A 22-year-old Oklahoma woman, brought to the U.S. as a child, told Stateline she’s leaving for her native Mexico on a flight this month to start a new life.

Living in Mexico may be hard, but the threat of arrest and detention after the One Big Beautiful Bill Act was signed, giving extra funding for immigration enforcement, was too much for her.

“It’s tough. I’m leaving behind an entire life here, everyone I know, everything I’ve ever known. I speak Spanish, but not the best. My thoughts are in English. I have to readapt to everything,” she said.

“More than anything, I’m tired of being called a criminal here,” said the woman, who asked not to be identified by name, fearing interference with her flight.

“I was in leadership in high school. I was in the marching band. I have a college degree here. I am not a criminal, and this is not OK, what’s happening now,” said the woman, who said her parents brought her at the age of 6 on a tourist visa.

She didn’t qualify for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, because her family took her on trips back to Mexico, she said, returning on new tourist visas.

“I am 22 years old now and undocumented,” she said, “I can’t speak to my parents’ actions. I know there’s issues with legality in that and they made choices that were not favorable. I was a child.”

Discussions abound on Reddit, an online chat site, about whether to take a government offer to leave or continue to face the threat of arrest and detention if not deportation.

“After over 20 years of living here illegally (I was brought here as a toddler) I think now is finally the time to throw in the towel. I simply do not belong in the US nor am I wanted here,” one man, who said he was born in Mexico, wrote this month in a chat group for Mexican expatriates.

“I’ve worked in construction a large part of my adult life so I have some money saved up, but no career,” he added. “I just feel tired of not being able to do anything meaningful with my life here. I can’t get a driver’s license. I have no hope of ever retiring when I grow old and I can’t even get a real job.”

The Trump administration is using a “potent combination of carrots and sticks” to encourage immigrants without legal status to leave, according to the Migration Policy Institute report. High-profile arrests at workplaces, homes, court hearings and even citizenship interviews have “generated intense nervousness” while poor conditions in detention centers and the threat of removal to unknown countries create “a palpable fear of arrest,” the report stated.

The Department of Homeland Security has a cellphone app — called CBP Home — that offers a plane ticket and $1,000 to “illegal aliens” wishing to leave. The department told Stateline, in a statement attributed only to a senior official, that “tens of thousands of illegal aliens have utilized the CBP Home app” but did not provide further detail.

Thousands more people have accepted voluntary departure rather than fight immigration court cases and take a chance on arrest and detention. The Pew Research Center found that the overall immigrant population dropped from a record 53.3 million in January to 51.9 million in June, though the change could be due partly to a heightened fear of responding to surveys among immigrants.

In another sign of increased appetite for leaving the country, a social media group helping such people decide has seen soaring membership.

The group, Onward, was started by three DACA recipients who moved abroad during the first Trump administration. It has seen 10,000 join requests this year, more than triple the interest it’s had previously in its four years of existence, said Jason Hong, a founding member. Hong was born in South Korea, brought to the U.S. as a child, grew up in New Jersey, and has opted to live in Spain. There, he is a legal resident and has an opportunity for Spanish citizenship. U.S. citizenship wasn’t an option under DACA.

“If I want to shoot for citizenship here, I can,” Hong said. “For the time being I want to focus on helping others who are making the same decision.”

Another Onward founder, Monsy Hernández, left South Carolina during the first Trump administration in 2017, settling in Germany.

“I was very traumatized with the discrimination I faced in the United States when my mom was put into one of the ICE detention centers. I just wanted to go somewhere where no one knew that I was Mexican,” Hernández said. “I thought, OK, if I’m in Germany, I will be very, very far away from that discrimination.”

Widespread departure of immigrants is almost unprecedented in the U.S. history, Chishti said, though there was a large-scale return of Italian immigrants in the 19th century. They were known in Italy as“ritornati”— a wave of farmers and laborers who arrived here when work was scarce in their home country, then returned home with their savings after a few years, when economic conditions in Italy improved.

More recently, some people from Mexico returned home when work dried up during the 2008 Great Recession.

But the current departures under pressure and threats from the U.S. government seems to be unprecedented, Chishti said. In some cases, parents have been pressured to leave the country or face separation from their children.

Voluntary departure is also an option to settle immigration court cases, and more people are taking that route. In those cases, immigrants must pay their own way and can’t have a conviction for a serious crime. Choosing voluntary departure can get immigrants released from detention and avoid a removal order that could cause them to be permanently barred from returning.

According to federal statistics obtained by the Deportation Data Project and analyzed by Stateline, 6,118 people were granted voluntary departure between Jan. 20 and July 29, the latest figures available, compared with 2,550 for the same time period last year during the Biden administration. For both years, the majority of cases involved citizens of Mexico returning to Mexico.

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Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

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