By Ted Hayson and Christina Cook
WASHINGTON, Dec 11 (Reuters) – An email from U.S. immigration officials 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.
Vargas, who was held in a Texas detention center, had already received a deportation order and was forced to board flights to Colombia. They protested that they faced forced labor and death threats from cartel members in Mexico because they submitted visa applications as victims of human trafficking.
In an Oct. 31 email, immigration officials threatened to prosecute them for failing to comply with a deportation order, a rarely used statute that can carry up to 10 years in prison.
Their case illustrates how U.S. President Donald Trump’s massive immigration crackdown has relied on threats to separate families and other aggressive tactics to pressure people to accept deportation — even after previous administrations filed legal claims allowing them to stay in the country, according to immigrants, lawyers, current and former court officials and reviewed records.
These tactics include threats of prison terms for resisting deportation orders or crossing the border illegally – crimes that were previously rarely prosecuted and separation from children – as well as the opportunity to seek release from prolonged detention and deportation to distant 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 use of increasingly draconian tactics to force immigrants to accept deportation.
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. “What we are doing is legal.”
Locked up and forced to deport
The Vargases chose to abandon their visa applications and have Maria Paola placed in the federal shelter system for unaccompanied immigrant children rather than risk being separated on a deportation flight in November.
“I was afraid they were going to put me in jail and carry out all the threats they made,” Kelly Vargas said.
Tricia McLaughlin, spokeswoman for the US Department of Homeland Security, said the family was issued a deportation order in 2024, was denied on appeal and received full due process. He did not comment on visa applications for victims of human trafficking.
When asked about federal charges and threats to separate the Vargas case and another family, McLaughlin said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials do not “threaten” people and properly inform them they could face federal charges.
“These illegal aliens have broken the law and they have been warned that they will face the consequences of their crimes,” she said.
Immigration advocates and other critics say Vargas and others with potentially legitimate claims to stay in the United States are caught in a numbers game. The Trump administration has set a goal of deporting 1 million people per year, but given current trends, that goal is unlikely to be met.
DHS said 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 end of the year.
Ellora Mukherjee, director of Columbia Law School’s Immigrant Rights Clinic, which represents the Vargas family, said the Trump administration’s “calculated brutality” has forced people to choose deportation.
“My detention clients from New Jersey to Texas report overcrowding, inhumane and degrading detention conditions, some of which are so intolerable that they abandon their immigration cases,” she said.
‘Voluntary Departures’ Spike Under Trump
As the Trump administration pushes for more deportations, it has tried to detain more immigrants while their cases are pending.
The number of people in ICE custody has increased by nearly 70% since Trump took office in January, to about 66,000 by November 2025, government figures show.
Previously, those without criminal records had a better chance of being released pending decisions on their asylum and other claims.
ICE changed its stance in July to argue that all immigrants it arrested were ineligible for bonds, payments made back 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 who said they could face months or years of detention as their cases move through a backlog of immigration courts have already agreed to leave the country, deported immigrants and lawyers told Reuters.
Among those who dropped their cases: a Guatemalan farm worker who left her husband and son in Florida after a workplace raid, a Venezuelan landscaper living in Texas, an Ecuadorian 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 with which they have no ties, a strategy rarely used by the government. The threat of deportation to third countries, including countries that could imprison them, prompted some to abandon their cases, immigrants, family members and lawyers told Reuters.
Lorival Paulo da Silva, a Brazilian citizen, 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 to legalize his status because he entered the United States illegally, the documents show, a lengthy process.
After weeks in immigration detention, including at a 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 would make it easier to return in the future — and he left the United States on October 10. Botts said da Silva was struggling in Brazil, but hoped his spousal immigrant visa would be approved next year so he could return.
Federal immigration court data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonprofit research organization, shows a jump in court-approved voluntary departures.
The number of people granted voluntary departure while in custody increased fivefold 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 abandoned their cases and were ordered deported.
DHS did not respond to a request for comment about her 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 feared he would end up in prison in El Salvador. A judge ordered him deported.
“That was the fastest way out of torture,” Grillo said.
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(Reporting by Ted Hesson in Washington and Christina Cook in San Francisco; Additional reporting by Brad Heath; Editing by Craig Timberg and Aurora Ellis)
