By VICTORIA CHURCHILL, US POLITICAL REPORTER
Published: | Updated:
Kristi Noem is doing her best to pad the Trump administration’s deportation record before the end of the calendar year.
The Secretary of Homeland Security has touted a stipend of $3,000, as well as a free flight home to all illegal immigrants who chose to self-deport from the United States before December 31.
The bonus is triple the $1,000 amount that has been offered by the Trump administration in the past for individuals who chose to self-deport.
This offer, made during a Monday morning appearance on Fox and Friends, however, came with a more ominous warning.
Noem also pledged that ‘illegalaliens should take advantage of this gift and self-deport because if they dont, we will find them, we will arrest them, and they will not return.’
Her latest announcement comes as other leaders in the Trump administration are reportedly not happy with the number or pace of deportations that have persisted during the first year of the second Trump Administration.
An earlier report from the New York Times noted that, per DHS, more than 400,000 deportations have taken place during the second Trump administration thus far.
That number is said to be short of Stephen Miller’s target of 3,000 per day, currently averaging between 1,000 to 2,000 per day.
US Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem speaks during a tour of the Terrorist Confinement Center (CECOT) in Tecoluca, El Salvador, on March 26
Deported migrants arrive from the US in a military plane at Ramon Villeda Morales airport in Cortes, Honduras, in January. More than 70 Hondurans have been sent back to their country
By the end of the year, according to DHS, Trump is presently on pace to deport 600,000 illegal immigrants, short of his one million goal.
Trump has been rumored to be searching for a replacement for Noem to head DHS, and Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, who is leaving his job next month due to term limits, has been a name floated as a successor.
The Daily Mail reported earlier this month on the Trump administration’s frantic push to hire 10,000 new deportation officers by the year’s end, exposing how lax vetting and lucrative signing bonuses have lured in a wave of woefully unfit recruits.
‘We have people failing open-book tests and we have folks that can barely read or write English,’ one DHS official told the Daily Mail.
‘We even had a 469lb man sent to the academy whose own doctor certified him not at all fit for any physical activity.’
Insiders said the vetting process has been so rushed that officials did not even wait for drug test results to come back before hiring recruits and flying them off to Georgia, only to discover afterward that tests came back positive.
A department spokesman at the time said the hiring surge was advancing ‘while maintaining high fitness and training standards’.
They added:’The vast majority of new officers more than 85 percent brought on during the hiring surge are experienced law enforcement officers who have already successfully completed a law enforcement academy.’