The claim stated that a program would provide a $3,000 stipend and a free flight home for people who self-deport via the CBP Home app by December 31, 2025. This referred to the Trump administration’s expansion of the CBP Home voluntary departure scheme and the year‑end “holiday stipend” offer.
On December 22, 2025, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued an official press release announcing that “illegal aliens who sign up to self-deport through the CBP Home app by the end of the year will receive a $3,000 stipend in addition to a free flight home,” explicitly tying the payout and airfare to registration via CBP Home before December 31, 2025. The same release reaffirmed that DHS would arrange and pay for travel and forgive certain civil fines for those using the app.
Major outlets including USA Today, CBS News, and
Fortune independently reported the stipend increase to $3,000 per person and confirmed that the offer was available only through the CBP Home app and only for those who departed by the end of 2025. These reports describe the program as already in operation, with DHS officials citing “tens of thousands” of undocumented immigrants having used CBP Home for voluntary departure and framing the higher stipend as a temporary, year‑end escalation of an existing $1,000 bonus program.
Background documents on CBP Home and Project Homecoming show that, since mid‑2025, DHS had already been offering cost‑free travel and a $1,000 “exit bonus” via the app, which was then rebranded and expanded to support self‑departure logistics. The December 22 DHS announcement and subsequent coverage are consistent with this trajectory, presenting the $3,000 stipend as a tripling of an already active benefit rather than a hypothetical future scheme.
Independent investigative reporting, particularly by ProPublica and the Guardian, and immigrant‑rights analyses document serious implementation problems with the earlier $1,000 bonus and related CBP Home departures: missed flights, long delays in arranging travel documents, and promised payments that were delayed, misdirected, or in some cases never delivered until journalists intervened. Visa-focused reporting on the $3,000 campaign similarly notes technical glitches and “significant payment delays” in disbursing funds through the app.
These failures show that, in practice, some migrants who tried to use CBP Home did not receive benefits reliably or on time, and that the government’s operational capacity lagged behind its promises. However, none of the available evidence indicates that the December 22 policy was rescinded before the December 31, 2025 deadline, or that DHS stopped offering free flights and the $3,000 stipend through CBP Home during that window.
Given the presence of a formal DHS policy, corroborating mainstream reporting, and ongoing departures arranged via CBP Home by year’s end, a reasonable assessment is that the underlying claim—that such a program would exist and offer a $3,000 stipend plus a free flight home for those self‑deporting through CBP Home by December 31, 2025—was fulfilled. The promise was completed in policy and implementation terms, though marred by execution problems and uneven delivery to individual participants.
In impact terms, DHS claims that since January 2025 some 1.9 million people have “voluntarily self‑deported,” with “tens of thousands” using CBP Home; these figures cannot be independently verified but suggest the program is one of the administration’s main tools for driving down the undocumented population while shifting costs and risks onto migrants. The year‑end $3,000 offer amplified incentives to leave quickly but operated alongside strong threats of arrest and permanent bans, reshaping incentives through a mix of cash inducement and coercive enforcement messaging rather than through rights‑based migration policy.