Immigration Keywords: Voluntary Departure

Essential vocabulary for understanding immigration

One of the topics I’ll be writing about regularly on here are the keywords and key concepts that are essential to understanding the immigration system. Today we’ll tackle the basics of what’s called “voluntary departure.”

Immigration who are in the United States without lawful status—commonly referred to as “undocumented immigrants”—face the potential of deportation. But in many cases, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) cannot deport them immediately. Immigrants must go through a legal process in the Immigration Courts called “removal proceedings,” where they have the opportunity to meet with a judge and may even be able to present a case for why they should not be deported.

If immigrants lose their case (or if they don’t have a case), they will probably receive a deportation order. (Removal is the newer term for deportation, but it can be used interchangeably in most cases.) One really bad part about being ordered deported is that, in addition to leaving the country, a deportation order also prevents that person from applying to come to the US lawfully for 3 years, 10 years, or sometimes a lifetime.

This is where voluntary departure comes in.

An Immigration Judge has the authority to grant voluntary departure to some immigrants who meet certain criteria. Voluntary departure enables a person to leave the US without receiving an official deportation order on their record and it may allow them to apply to come to the US lawfully without waiting many years. In most cases, voluntary departure provides a 90-day window in which the person has to leave the US, so practically speaking, this also provides a person time to get their affairs in order (lease agreement, finances, personal belongings, etc.) before leaving.

Although voluntary departure is often described as a benefit, let’s be clear: the person is still required to leave the US. So in the scheme of things, it’s not as if this is some fantastic deal.

In fiscal year 2020 (October 2019 to September 2020), about 5,750 deportation cases—or about 3% of all cases—ended with voluntary departure. You can see the data online here under the option for “outcomes.”

ICE (as well as many conservative groups) have politicized voluntary departure. Some claim that people who are granted voluntary departure never actually leave, and therefore they view voluntary departure as a kind of amnesty. In fact, in the final days of the 2020 presidential election (surprise, surprise), ICE created “Operation Broken Promise,” a push to identify and arrest immigrants who received voluntary departure but didn’t leave. Despite the enormous expense of resources, the operation only resulted in 150 arrests—which isn’t that much when compared to the tens of thousands of people who have been granted voluntary departure in just the past few years.

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