A record number of immigrants in United States deportation proceedings are forgoing their legal claims and asking immigration judges for permission to leave the country voluntarily, according to a new analysis of federal data that researchers say marks a structural change in how the American immigration system is producing departures.
The report, released this week by the Vera Institute of Justice — a New York-based nonpartisan research organization that studies the criminal-legal and immigration systems — is based on records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request from the Executive Office for Immigration Review, the U.S. Department of Justice agency that oversees the nation’s immigration courts.
According to the report, the number of immigrants in removal proceedings who received “voluntary departure” decisions rose from roughly 800 per month at the close of the Biden administration to more than 8,800 per month by February 2026 — an increase of more than tenfold in approximately one year.
The surge has been recorded across the country, with the report finding that roughly three-quarters of U.S. states and territories have seen voluntary departure decisions rise more than fivefold since the end of the Biden term.
The findings, first reported by ABC News, arrive amid the most aggressive interior immigration enforcement push in modern U.S. history — and at a moment when hundreds of thousands of immigrants, including a substantial number of Haitian nationals stripped of legal status under the current administration, are facing the most consequential decisions of their lives inside a strained court system.
What Voluntary Departure Actually Means
A voluntary departure is a formal decision issued by an immigration judge in which a person already in removal proceedings is permitted to leave the United States on their own initiative, provided the judge determines that the person is legally eligible to depart. The procedure exists separately from the self-deportation pathway managed by the Department of Homeland Security, in which immigrants notify DHS that they intend to leave the country — often as a strategy to avoid detention or a formal removal order on their record.
That distinction matters. DHS recently announced it would raise its self-deportation stipend from $1,000 to $2,600 per person, signaling the administration’s broader strategy to encourage departures outside the immigration court system. The Vera report focuses on what is happening inside the courts themselves, where the decisions are issued by federal judges and the immigrants in question are already in the formal removal pipeline — many of them in detention.
A Tenfold Increase, Spread Across the Country
“This is widespread across the United States,” Jacquelyn Pavilon, one of the authors of the Vera report, told ABC News, noting that voluntary departure decisions have risen more than fivefold across roughly three-quarters of U.S. states and territories since the end of the Biden administration.
A central finding of the report is that the rise in voluntary departures is not the result of judges substituting one form of forced departure for another. Removal orders — the formal deportation decisions issued at the conclusion of immigration court proceedings — have continued at comparable rates over the same period.
“This increase in voluntary departures is not happening instead of removal orders; it’s actually happening alongside removal orders,” Pavilon told ABC News.
In other words, the share of the immigration court docket producing some form of required departure has expanded, while the share permitting an immigrant to remain in the United States has contracted. That shift, researchers said, is the more consequential structural change captured in the data.
Newly Appointed Judges and a 93 Percent Outcome
The Vera report identifies a particular pattern among immigration judges appointed under the second Trump administration. According to the data, these newly appointed judges have granted voluntary departures at higher rates than their more experienced peers, while continuing to issue removal orders at rates comparable to those of their more experienced peers.
The combined effect, the report found, is that more than 93 percent of initially detained cases assigned to these newer judges resulted in an outcome requiring the immigrant to leave the United States — whether through a voluntary departure decision or a formal removal order.
The data also reflected partisan patterns. Pavilon told ABC News that, among detained cases, judges appointed by Republican administrations encouraged immigrants to leave the country at higher rates than judges appointed by Democratic administrations.
The Role of Legal Counsel
One of the most consistent findings in the Vera analysis concerns legal representation. According to the report, immigration judges are, on average, less likely to encourage immigrants to leave the United States when those immigrants are represented by counsel — a pattern that tracks with longstanding research showing that legal representation dramatically improves outcomes for immigrants in U.S. removal proceedings.
Pavilon emphasized that many of the immigrants now opting for voluntary departure may, in fact, have legal options available to them — including asylum claims, withholding of removal, cancellation of removal, or other forms of relief. The decision to depart, she said, is often driven less by a clear-eyed assessment of legal merits and more by the cumulative pressure of detention, separation from family, the cost of legal services, and the prolonged uncertainty of court proceedings.
“Many of those people may have legal avenues to remain in the United States,” Pavilon told ABC News.
It is important to note that voluntary departure does not preserve future immigration options. Once a person has departed under such a decision, returning lawfully to the United States typically requires navigating a complex set of barriers, including multi-year reentry bars depending on the individual’s immigration history.
The Haitian Stakes
For the Haitian community in the United States, the Vera report’s findings carry particular weight.
The Department of Homeland Security terminated Temporary Protected Status for Haiti in 2025, exposing an estimated 350,000 to 560,000 Haitian nationals — many of whom have lived and worked in the country for years, some for more than a decade — to the prospect of removal proceedings. Massachusetts alone is home to more than 45,000 Haitian TPS holders, according to the International Institute of New England, making it the state with the third-largest Haitian population in the country. Florida and New York host the largest concentrations.
For Haitians who have since been placed in removal proceedings, the dynamics described in the Vera report are not abstract. The same combination of detention conditions, limited access to attorneys, high legal costs, and prolonged court timelines has been documented at length in Haitian community organizations across Boston, New York, and South Florida. Immigration advocates have raised concerns that some Haitians may be agreeing to voluntary departure not out of a settled wish to return to Haiti — a country still defined by acute political instability and widespread gang violence — but because the alternative path through the court system has become, as Pavilon put it to ABC News, a matter of “very difficult decisions” made “under harsh conditions.”
The Vera report does not break out outcomes by nationality, and the data do not allow for a precise count of Haitian voluntary departures. But the overall pattern — that immigrants with legal options are nonetheless leaving the United States at record rates — is one that Haitian legal service providers say they are observing firsthand in their casework.
What Comes Next
The Vera Institute report adds to a growing body of research documenting the on-the-ground effects of the current administration’s enforcement strategy and is likely to intensify debate among lawmakers, federal courts, and advocacy organizations over the conditions under which voluntary departure decisions are made within the immigration court system.
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to ABC News’ request for comment.
For Haitian families across the United States, the report sharpens the urgency of broader questions about the future of legal protections for the community — including the discharge petition that forced an April 2026 House vote to extend Haitian TPS through 2029, which passed 224 to 204 and now faces a veto threat from the White House, and the DIGNIDAD Act, the bipartisan bill that would offer renewable legal status to long-term undocumented immigrants who have been in the United States since December 2020.
CTN will continue to follow these developments and their implications for the Haitian community in the United States.
Caribbean Television Network (CTN) is a multilingual digital news organization serving the Haitian diaspora and broader Caribbean community across the United States.
Editorial Disclaimer
This article was originally written in English. Versions in other languages — including French and Haitian Creole — are made available through AI translation software. Errors and inaccuracies may be present in translated versions. Only the English version should be considered the authoritative record.
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