German Pineda, 32, just wanted to go home.
After his arrest by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in June, Pineda, a Honduran immigrant, spent four miserable days in immigration detention at Federal Plaza in Manhattan, sleeping on a concrete floor without sufficient food or a shower. Next, he was transferred to a detention center in Brooklyn, where staff treated him like a criminal, he says, though he’d lived in the country, working as a delivery driver, for 14 years. He couldn’t even call home.
A month later, ICE officials presented him with voluntary departure papers. He says they told him that he’d be flown free-of-charge to Honduras – and ICE would pay him $1,000. Plus, he’d be able to come back to the United States legally at a later date.
Pineda says they told him that if he refused, he’d be held months longer – and he’d end up deported anyway.
Desperate for relief, he signed the form on July 25. “I thought I’d be able to start over in my country,” he said through an interpreter. He’d be able to use the meager payoff to start a small business once he got back to Honduras.
But Pineda sat in detention for two more months.
His long detention is increasingly typical for those arrested by Customs and Border Patrol. By August, the CBP were detaining adults an average of 109 days, over twice as long as the average detention last October.
Documents reviewed by The Lens and The Guardian showed that $1,000 payments had been sent by wire to some immigrants who left the country voluntarily. But sometimes the money came and went while the immigrants were still being held in a detention center in the US. Other payment information was given to the wrong person. And some immigrants were told to expect the $1,000 when they arrived home, though in fact they were never eligible.
In Honduras, Pineda’s wire transfer went uncollected for more than 30 days. By the time he arrived in Honduras and tried to show his ID and collect the money, it had been returned to the financial services company handling the “self-deportation” payments.
“They deceived me,” said Pineda, frustrated. He was doubtful that anyone was receiving the promised DHS payments: “It’s a lie.” Pineda said he had spoken with 10 friends, from Honduras, Colombia, El Salvador, and Peru; all say they had signed the same paperwork and ended up with nothing.
Of almost a dozen immigration lawyers and migrants interviewed for this story, initially, no one knew anyone who had actually received the $1,000. Two people later received it as a result of this reporting.
Though the cases in this story represent a fraction of the people who took voluntary departure, they raise questions about the new, little-understood US program.
‘Project Homecoming’ begins
Guided by a Trump presidential proclamation, the Department of Homeland Security established “Project Homecoming” in May. “The American people are generously offering illegal aliens $1,000 and a free flight to self-deport now,” a DHS press release announced. To pay for the flights and “exit bonuses,” the State Department repurposed $250 million intended to help resettle refugees. It’s unclear how much of that $250 million has been spent – and to whom.
Not a penny made it to Robin Meneses, 54, a migrant from Nicaragua, who carries a photo in his phone of his signed voluntary departure form. It’s entitled “Salida Voluntaria,” and its text describes the terms of the deal, including the $1,000 exit bonus.
Meneses was deported to Nicaragua. But the money never came, he said.
Like Pineda, he felt duped. “They tricked me into leaving,” Meneses said in Spanish.
Though Meneses says ICE officers approached him with the $1,000 offer while he was in detention, he ultimately wasn’t registered for the exit bonus because he had a final order for removal dating back to 2022. Often, people are legally allowed to remain in the country after final orders, if enforcement is delayed or if they are placed under supervision.
The DHS website for Project Homecoming explicitly says that a final order of removal does “not preclude eligibility.” Like the website, DHS posters and flyers also seem to imply any “non-criminal” migrant can qualify for the payment and legal return.
“That part’s the most frustrating,” said Jennifer Whitlock, senior policy counsel with the National Immigration Law Center. “Some people think this is a way to get right with the law, and nothing could be further from the truth.” Whitlock emphasized those who agree to incentivized voluntary departure while already detained are at the highest risk of letdown: “Those are the people that I’m routinely hearing from immigration attorneys, ‘Hey, my guy never got the $1,000.’”
The problems go far beyond the unpaid $1,000 payments. Migrants who use CBP Home to apply for voluntary departure provide their information and locations to the federal government, whether or not they qualify for the incentive program. And despite the promises, “Project Homecoming” does not ease the pathway for future legal returns: Pineda now faces a 5-year ban on returning to the US, unless he is granted a difficult-to-obtain waiver. Others face lifetime bans.
Pineda’s lawyer, Yosmin Badie, an immigration public defender with the Bronx Defenders in NYC, asked dozens of her Bronx Defender colleagues about DHS’ promised “exit bonus.” No one knew of a client who had been paid the $1,000.
ICE referred requests for comment to CBP. Neither CBP nor DHS responded to requests for comment.
Lots of publicity, little information
Across the nation, Project Homecoming’s voluntary departures are widely hawked through flyers posted in courtrooms and detention centers, which urge migrants to register through an app called CBP Home. The materials are part of a $200 million international ad campaign. Some courts have even sent Project Homecoming flyers to migrants on their dockets – a possible violation of legally-mandated court impartiality, according to warnings from the nonprofit Catholic Legal Immigration Network.
October reporting from ProPublica found there have been 25,000 departures via CBP Home. A little more than half returned home with DHS assistance, though it’s unclear how many deportees within that total received the $1,000.
In an October press release, the White House claimed that 1.6 million people have “voluntarily self-deported” from the US since Trump came into office. That number, however, appears to be based on a think tank’s analysis that includes people who were deported, died, or received asylum.
“Self-deporting” is not a legal term, though it is used on some DHS flyers that include a QR code for the CBP Home app. Long before the publicity and the $1,000 payments, migrants could apply for and be granted voluntary departure to waive legal proceedings and return to their country of origin, often to spare themselves long stints of detention as they waited for court dates.
Overall, Whitlock sees Project Homecoming’s policies as “slightly coercive, slightly hiding, a little bit of sleight of hand.” And for courts to grant voluntary departure orders to migrants promised exit bonuses “maybe is a bit outside the law,” she said, since it seems to sidestep a legal requirement that migrants applying for voluntary departure show they have enough money to depart the US.
Other people, other reasons
After working on housepainting crews and in restaurants in the US for 20 years, Fredis Castellon-Garcia, 45, was stopped in New York in mid-June as he left for work. The ICE officers were looking for different men, not Castellon-Garcia. But they arrested him anyway.
Castellon-Garcia, who has an infant son in New York, had sought a pathway to legal residency for decades. He’d even paid an immigration lawyer to try, unsuccessfully, to secure Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for him, as an immigrant from El Salvador. But after his arrest, he spent more than two months in ICE detention in Brooklyn before finally signing a paper that officers put in front of him. If he didn’t sign it, he was told, he could remain in detention for seven or eight more months – a threat made worse by the acute back injury he’d suffered in the center after a fall from a top bunk without a railing, which left him reliant on cellmates for help going to the bathroom and getting food, and for which he never received treatment despite requests.
He distinctly recalls the offer. “The ICE police, a Spanish guy, said, ‘Sign and you can come back, maybe in one year, or next year. And you will have $1,000 in your country in Western Union.’”
Castellon-Garcia signed. Within a week, he was whisked out of detention and onto an airplane that brought him to Alexandria, Louisiana, one of the country’s largest hubs for ICE flights. Three days later, he was flown to El Salvador. There, Western Union clerks told him they had nothing for him. He still struggles to sleep due to pain from his injury in detention.
Many others signed the paperwork and faced similar fates. Pedro Mena got to Colombia and accessed the email account he’d been told contained his payment information, only to find information for a stranger – a woman named Ana. An ICE supervisor who reviewed the case told the Lens and the Guardian that Mena was given the woman’s account information in error, and that Mena was actually ineligible due to being previously removed from the US.
Those who did ultimately receive the $1000 only did so after the Lens and the Guardian directly contacted the financial services company handling the payments.
Elmer Amnel Domniguez Perez, who followed a similar path to Honduras this summer, met all the program’s requirements, but says he faced repeated hurdles to getting his promised payment. He didn’t have the password for the email account that received the payment information, and he couldn’t reset the email password, because the linked phone number didn’t work in Honduras. When he finally resolved that problem, he still couldn’t collect, because the payment had been sent to Western Union without his full name included. The Lens and The Guardian asked the payment processing company to send the payment once more with Perez’s full name, and he was able to collect it.
In some cases, it remains unclear why people were never given their promised payment. Shanna Loulendo, 21, signed the papers agreeing to voluntary departure back to France after she was arrested for criminal mischief in the US, a charge that was later dismissed. She was eligible and she requested the payment directly. But when she arrived in France, she found that she had simply never been registered for the program.
Migrants like Loulendo have little recourse. Flyers advertising the program include two email addresses migrants can contact if they have issues: a government address, projecthomecoming@hq.dhs.gov, and what appears to be a corporate email address, wiretransfers@cbp-home.com. Repeated emails to the government email received no response. Loulendo emailed the “wiretransfers” email address and received a form email in response, instructing her to download the CBP Home app, even though she was already back in France.
An ICE supervisor who reviewed Loulendo’s case told The Lens and The Guardian that her attorney should have asked her immigration judge for an “incentive voluntary departure” (IVD), instead of a “voluntary departure” (VD), a suggestion that baffled her lawyer, Osman Yasin, because he had never heard of such thing as an “IVD.”
“This is crazy,” he said. “As far as I know that [IVD] is not something immigration judges order.”
The distinction was not apparent on court documents, either: Pineda and Loulendo, both clients of the Bronx Defenders, each had identical departure orders signed by New York immigration judges. Pineda’s money was sent (though it expired), while Loulendo’s money was never sent.
Company sending payments linked to former State Department official
Payment information documents from Pineda and Perez show that their “exit bonus” wire transfers were sent by Soterex Financial Services, LLC.
Business records for Soterex, which is headquartered in Arlington, list William Walters as a member or manager of the company. Walters is a former State Department official.
In 2023, Walters also founded Salus Worldwide Solutions, which shares an address with Soterex and earlier this year received a massive federal contract to “support the voluntary self-deportation of illegal aliens.” The $915 million deal is now being contested in court: another company that managed past deportation flights alleges that the US government violated regulatory standards by quickly awarding the contract, without open competition, to Salus, a relatively new company with no previous federal contracts. The DHS division overseeing the contract was run by CEO Walters’ former colleague. Salus is not a named defendant in the lawsuit.
Soterex, meanwhile, was formed on May 13, a mere four days after Trump issued the presidential proclamation directing the Secretaries of State and Homeland Security to create Project Homecoming, and four days before DHS issued a request for proposals.
Although the payment information indicates that Soterex is handling at least some of the Project Homecoming payments, there are no records of Soterex holding contracts with the federal government.
Neither Soterex nor Salus responded to attempts to reach the companies for comment. The only email listed on Soterex’s website bounced back messages as undeliverable. William Walters also did not respond to attempts to reach him for comment.
Pineda was eventually able to retrieve his payment by contacting Soterex through the company’s website, requesting that the transfer be re-sent. He plans to start a small mechanic business in Honduras, he said, “to begin my new life here in my country.”
This investigative piece was produced in partnership with The Guardian.
