By Ted Hesson and Kristina Cooke
WASHINGTON, Dec 11 (Reuters) – The email from a U.S. immigration officer presented Kelly and Yerson Vargas with a stark choice: accept deportation to their native Colombia or risk being charged with a crime and separated from their 6-year-old daughter, Maria Paola.
The Vargases, held at a Texas detention center, had already received a deportation order and been pressured to board flights to Colombia. They had resisted because they had submitted visa applications as victims of human trafficking, saying they faced forced labor and death threats from cartel members in Mexico as they transited to the U.S.
In the October 31 email, the immigration officer threatened to prosecute them for failure to comply with the deportation order, a rarely used statute that could lead to 10 years in prison.
Their case illustrates how U.S. President Donald Trump’s vast immigration crackdown is increasingly relying on threats to separate families and other aggressive tactics to pressure people into accepting deportation – even if they have submitted legal claims that in previous administrations would have allowed them to stay in the country, according to immigrants, attorneys, current and former officials and court records reviewed by Reuters.
These tactics include threats of jail sentences for resisting a deportation order or crossing the border illegally – crimes that previously were rarely prosecuted and would lead to separation from children – as well as prolonged detention with no opportunity to seek release and deportation to far-flung third countries, Reuters found.
Reuters spoke to 16 immigration attorneys, who collectively have hundreds of clients, and others with broad visibility into the Trump administration’s rising use of harsh tactics to force immigrants to accept deportations.
White House border czar Tom Homan defended the Trump administration’s approach.
“We’re using every tool in the toolbox,” Homan told Reuters in an interview. “Everything we’re doing is legal.”
LOCKED UP AND PRESSURED TO DEPORT
The Vargases chose to abandon their visa applications and board a deportation flight in November rather than risk being split up, with Maria Paola placed in a federal shelter system for unaccompanied migrant children.
“I was afraid that they would put me in jail and carry out all the threats they made,” Kelly Vargas said.
U.S. Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said the family had been issued a deportation order in 2024, been denied on appeal, and received full due process. She did not comment on the visa application for victims of human trafficking.
When asked about the Vargas case and another family threatened with federal charges and separation, McLaughlin said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers don’t “threaten” people and appropriately informed them they could face federal charges.
“These illegal aliens broke the law and were warned they would face the consequences for their crimes,” she said.
Immigration advocates and other critics say the Vargases and others with potentially legitimate claims to stay in the United States are caught in what amounts to a numbers game. The Trump administration has said it aims to deport 1 million people per year, but is likely to fall short of that goal, given current trends.
DHS said on Wednesday that the Trump administration had deported more than 605,000 people since Trump took office, putting it on pace for fewer than 700,000 deportations by the year’s end.
Elora Mukherjee, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School, which represented the Vargas family, said the Trump administration’s “calculated cruelty” was forcing people to choose deportation.
“My detained clients from New Jersey to Texas report crowded, inhumane, and degrading detention conditions, some of which are so unbearable that they are giving up on their immigration cases,” she said.
‘VOLUNTARY DEPARTURES’ SPIKE UNDER TRUMP
As the Trump administration has pushed for more deportations, it has tried to detain more immigrants while their cases play out.
The number of people in ICE detention has increased by around 70% since Trump took office in January to almost 66,000 in November 2025, government data show.
Previously, those without criminal records had good chances of being released pending decisions on their asylum and other claims.
ICE changed its stance in July to argue that essentially all immigrants it arrested were ineligible for bond, a refundable payment made to the government to secure someone’s release.
A federal judge in California blocked ICE’s new interpretation of the law in November. However, some immigrants, told they could face months or years of detention as their case moved through the backlogged immigration courts, already had agreed to leave the country, deported immigrants and lawyers told Reuters.
Among those who gave up their cases: a Guatemalan farmworker who left behind her husband and son in Florida after being picked up in a workplace raid, a Venezuelan landscaper who had been living in Texas, an Ecuadorean construction worker in New York, a Mexican social worker in Alabama and a Honduran nursing student in North Carolina.
The Trump administration has also sent hundreds of people to third countries to which they have no ties, a tactic the government rarely used in the past. The threat of deportation to a third country, including to countries where they might be imprisoned, prompted some to abandon their cases, immigrants, family members and lawyers told Reuters.
Lourival Paulo da Silva, a Brazilian national, had lived in the U.S. for more than two decades when he was detained by immigration agents in Florida in September, according to his stepdaughter, Karina Botts. He was married to a U.S. citizen and was working on legalizing his status, documents show, a lengthy process because he had entered the United States illegally.
After weeks in immigration detention, including in the remote Florida Everglades camp dubbed Alligator Alcatraz, where he fell ill and tested positive for tuberculosis, da Silva gave up, Botts said.
A judge granted him voluntary departure – a discretionary decision that makes it easier to come back in the future – and he left the United States on October 10. Botts said da Silva was struggling in Brazil, but hopes his spousal immigrant visa will be approved next year so that he can return.
Federal immigration court data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a non-profit research organization, show a jump in court-approved voluntary departures.
The number of people who were granted voluntary departure while detained jumped more than five-fold to more than 16,000 in the first eight months of 2025, compared with the same period a year earlier under former President Joe Biden, the data show. That number does not include those who gave up on their cases and were ordered deported.
DHS did not respond to a request for comment regarding his case.
Hector Grillo, a 31-year-old Venezuelan who was detained in Texas earlier this year before being deported to Venezuela, said he asked to be sent home because he was terrified of ending up in a prison in El Salvador. A judge ordered him deported.
“That was the fastest way to get out of that torture,” Grillo said.
(Reporting by Ted Hesson in Washington and Kristina Cooke in San Francisco; Additional reporting by Brad Heath; Editing by Craig Timberg and Aurora Ellis)
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