The Trump administration has unveiled an overhauled cellphone app once used to let migrants apply for asylum, turning it into a system that allows people living illegally in the US to say they want to leave the country voluntarily.
The renamed app, announced Monday and now called CBP Home, is part of the administration’s campaign to encourage “self-deportations, ” touted as an easy and cost-effective way to nudge along President Donald Trump’s push to deport millions of immigrants without legal status.
“The app provides illegal aliens in the United States with a straightforward way to declare their intent to voluntarily depart, offering them the chance to leave before facing harsher consequences,” Pete Flores, the acting commissioner for USCustoms and Border Protection, said in a statement.
Moments after Trump took office, the earlier version of the app, CBP One, stopped allowing migrants to apply for asylum, and tens of thousands of border appointments were canceled.
More than 900,000 people were allowed in the country on immigration parole under CBP One, generally for two years, starting in January 2023.
The Trump administration has repeatedly urged migrants in the country illegally to leave.
“The CBP Home app gives aliens the option to leave now and self deport, so they may still have the opportunity to return legally in the future and live the American dream,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said on the social platform X. “If they don’t, we will find them, we will deport them, and they will never return.”
Experts wondered how many people without legal status would register for what has long been known as “voluntary departure,” or what the government hopes to gain from the new app.
“I’m not sure what their intentions are,” said Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, associate policy analyst with the Migration Policy Institute. “But they’re creating a bit of a culture of fear around immigration right now,” from highly publicized ICE arrests to sending immigrants to a detention camp at Guantanamo Bay. The new app, she said, could be part of that “targeted public relations campaign” to urge more people to leave the US
Some people living in the US illegally chose to leave even before Trump’s inauguration, though it’s unclear how many.
But earlier mass crackdowns on illegal immigration — most famously a quasi-military operation in the mid-1950s that Trump has repeatedly praised — also drove many immigrants who were in the US legally to leave.
Homeland Security overhauls its asylum phone app. Now it’s for ‘self-deportation’
https://arab.news/meqjy
Homeland Security overhauls its asylum phone app. Now it’s for ‘self-deportation’
- Moments after Trump took office, the earlier version of the app, CBP One, stopped allowing migrants to apply for asylum, and tens of thousands of border appointments were canceled
Trump invites Colombia’s Petro to White House after earlier threat of military action
- Relations between Trump and Petro have been frosty since the Republican returned to the White House in January 2025
WASHINGTON/BOGOTA: Days after threatening Colombia with military action, US President Donald Trump on Wednesday said arrangements were being made for the country’s President Gustavo Petro to visit the White House, following a call between the two leaders. Trump and Petro said they discussed relations between the two countries in their first call since the US president on Sunday said that a US military operation focused on Colombia’s government “sounds good” to him. That threat followed Trump ordering the US capture of the president of neighboring Venezuela, who was flown to the US to face drug and weapons charges.
“It was a great honor to speak with the President of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, who called to explain the situation of drugs and other disagreements that we have had. I appreciated his call and tone, and look forward to meeting him in the near future,” Trump wrote on social media.
Trump added “arrangements are being made” for a meeting in Washington between himself and Petro, Colombia’s first leftist president, but gave no specific date for a meeting.
“We have spoken by phone for the first time since he became president,” Petro told supporters gathered at a rally in Bogota meant to celebrate Colombia’s sovereignty, adding he had requested a restart of dialogue between the two countries.
A source in Petro’s office told Reuters the call was “cordial” and “respectful.”
Relations between Trump and Petro have been frosty since the Republican returned to the White House in January 2025.
Trump has repeatedly accused the administration of Petro, without evidence, of enabling a steady flow of cocaine into the US, imposing sanctions on the Colombian leader in October.
On Sunday Trump referred to Petro as “a sick man, who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States.”
The US in September had revoked Petro’s visa after he joined a pro-Palestinian demonstration in New York following a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly and called on US soldiers to “disobey the orders of Trump.”
Petro, who has been a vocal opponent of Israel’s war in Gaza, had accused Trump of being “complicit in genocide” in Gaza and called for “criminal proceedings” over US missile attacks on suspected drug-running boats in Caribbean waters.
The Trump administration has carried out more than 30 strikes against suspected drug boats since September, in a campaign that has killed at least 110 people.
