You crossed the border. You were given a Notice to Appear. Someone helped you file an asylum application — a friend, a person you found on WhatsApp, a notario, maybe nobody at all and you did it yourself. You have been here two years, or three, or four. You are working. Your children are in school. And somewhere along the way you have started to suspect that the case you filed is not going to win.
Maybe an ICE attorney has now filed a motion asking the judge to throw the case out without a hearing. Maybe you missed the one-year filing deadline by a matter of days. Maybe you have simply read enough, or talked to enough people, to understand that what happened to you in your home country — the threats, the extortion, the neighbor who made your life impossible — is not what American asylum law protects.
If that is your situation, there is a decision in front of you that almost nobody is explaining honestly. The government is running an advertising campaign telling you to leave and collect a check. Advocacy organizations are telling you the offer is a trap. Neither one is telling you how the decision actually works, what leaving costs you, what it does not cost you, or how a lawyer would sequence it if you decided to go.
This page does that. It is written for the person whose case has been evaluated honestly and found weak. If your case is strong, this page is not for you — go build it.
Part One: Why isn’t my asylum case going to win?
Between 2021 and 2024, an enormous number of people arrived at the southern border under an expectation that turned out to be false: that reaching the United States and saying the word “asylum” would lead, eventually, to permission to stay. Appointments were scheduled through a government phone app. People were processed, issued Notices to Appear, and released into the interior with a court date years away.
What was not explained — not by the government, and certainly not by the people charging money to fill out forms — is that asylum is a narrow legal category, not a general humanitarian pathway. Under INA § 101(a)(42), asylum protects people who face persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. The connection between the harm and one of those five grounds is the whole case. Our complete guide to asylum applications walks through the legal standard in detail.
Generalized crime does not satisfy it. Extortion by a gang, without more, does not satisfy it. Poverty does not satisfy it. A country that is dangerous for everyone is, legally speaking, dangerous for no one in particular — and that is fatal to the claim.
Can the judge throw out my case without a hearing?
An immigration judge no longer has to hold a full hearing to reject a claim that does not work on paper. In Matter of H-A-A-V-, 29 I&N Dec. 233 (BIA 2025), the Board of Immigration Appeals held that where the factual allegations underlying an asylum, withholding, or Convention Against Torture claim, viewed in the light most favorable to the applicant, do not establish prima facie eligibility, the immigration judge may pretermit the applications without a full evidentiary hearing on the merits. (Read the decision.)
In plain terms: if the story on your application, even if every word of it is true, does not state a legal claim, the judge can dismiss it without ever hearing you testify.
The Board has since reinforced this. In Matter of C-I-G-M- & L-V-S-G-, 29 I&N Dec. 291 (BIA 2025), it held that an immigration judge erred by denying a DHS motion to pretermit. And in Matter of T-A-G-, 29 I&N Dec. 715 (BIA 2026), the Board held that a respondent’s potential eligibility for some other form of relief is not a factor the judge weighs when ruling on a motion to pretermit an asylum application. (EOIR Volume 29.)
This is why ICE motions to pretermit have become routine, and why so many people are learning at a master calendar hearing that the case they have been waiting three years to present is going to end in thirty days.
What if I filed after the one-year deadline?
Separately, INA § 208(a)(2)(B) requires the asylum application to be filed within one year of your last arrival. There are exceptions for changed circumstances and extraordinary circumstances, and the burden of proving one is on you. But the deadline is real, it is counted in days, and a filing that arrives late — even by a little — hands the government an argument that has nothing to do with whether you were ever in danger.
Part Two: What does an honest assessment of a weak case sound like?
Consider a composite of the kind of case that arrives in our office weekly. The details here have been changed; the shape is the pattern.
A woman is a national of one South American country. She did not come to the United States from there. She left home years earlier and built a life in a neighboring country, where she lived for the better part of a decade — worked, rented, raised children. Then she came north.
Her asylum application describes what drove her out of her original country: a hostile neighbor, a property dispute that turned ugly, thefts, a police force that did nothing. Every word of it may be true. None of it is asylum. There is no protected ground; there is no state actor; and the years of safe residence in a third country raise a firm-resettlement problem on top of everything else. On the paperwork, she also filed late.
She attended a hearing alone and learned that ICE had moved to pretermit, and that she had thirty days to respond.
Here is what an honest lawyer tells her. First: the motion is beatable, or at least worth fighting — procedural defenses to a late filing exist, and a pretermission motion is a legal argument that can be answered. Second, and harder: winning that motion buys her a hearing on a claim that is very likely to lose. Beating the motion is not the same as winning the case, and she should not spend her savings confusing the two.
That second conversation is the one this page exists for. When a client understands that the case will probably fail, the question changes from how do I win to how do I leave in a way that costs me the least.
Part Three: What is the government actually offering?
DHS is running a program called CBP Home — the renamed CBP One app — offering money and a flight to people who register an intent to leave. Before evaluating it, you need the terms as the government actually states them, not as the advertisements state them.
What does DHS’s own program page promise today?
As of September 7, 2026, the DHS CBP Home page states the offer as:
- A $3,000 exit bonus, paid after you arrive in your destination country. DHS says no bank account is necessary and that delivery varies by country.
- Cost-free travel, with departure estimated within about 21 days of approval, including help obtaining travel documents.
- Forgiveness of civil fines for failure to depart.
- De-prioritization by ICE for detention and enforcement while your departure is arranged.
- Registration of every co-traveler, including minors, in the app.
(Figures verified against the DHS page on September 7, 2026. This program’s terms have changed repeatedly — see below — so confirm the current offer in the app before relying on any number, including ours.)
Why can’t the government keep its own price straight?
Because it changes the number without telling anyone, and its own channels do not agree with each other. The stipend has been $1,000 (announced May 5, 2025); then $3,000 as a holiday promotion for people who registered by December 31, 2025 (announced December 22, 2025); then $2,600 (announced January 21, 2026), with DHS adding that the offer “may not last long.”
Then it moved again, and this time nobody announced it. On August 28, 2026, the official DHS account on X told readers: “The United States is offering illegal aliens $3,000 and a free flight to self-deport now.” That same day, the department’s own program page still said $2,600 and contained no reference to $3,000 at all — we checked it on August 31 and it had not changed. By September 7 the program page read $3,000. No press release marks the change; the most recent CBP Home release DHS lists is still the January announcement of $2,600.
We are not making a partisan point. We are making a practical one, and it is the single most useful thing on this page: an agency whose social media account and program page disagree by $400 for a week, and which then changes the price with no announcement, is not a source you should rely on from memory. Whatever number you have heard — from a friend, from a video, from an advertisement, from this page — verify it inside the app at the moment you register, and do not make a family decision based on a figure you cannot see on the government’s own screen today.
Is the bonus per person, or per family — and who can you ask?
DHS does not say, and there is no phone number to call. For a parent this is not a detail. The difference between one payment and one payment per registered person is the difference between arriving in Honduras or Nicaragua with a cushion and arriving with a cushion three or four times as large — or not. The program page comes close to answering: it says every co-traveler “including minors” must be registered “to receive the benefits of CBP Home self-deportation assistance,” and that unregistered minors “will not receive the incentives offered through CBP Home.” That reads as though each registered person, child or adult, is a beneficiary. It does not say that each one receives $3,000, and we will not do that arithmetic for you on an inference.
The department publishes no hotline for the program. The only contacts on its page are an email address, [email protected], and a suggestion to contact your own country’s embassy. So do this, in writing, before you commit: email that address, state how many people will register, and ask two questions — what the exit bonus is today, and whether it is paid to each registered person including children. Keep the reply. A written answer from the agency, dated before you left, is worth more than anything you were told by a friend, a video, or this page — and if the answer materially changes your decision, you will have learned that while you could still act on it.
Does the money actually arrive?
Usually, in our observation — but plan as if it might not. Reporting on the program’s first year documented participants who never received the stipend, others who received it late, and people whom ICE encouraged to leave with a stipend for which they were not eligible (ProPublica, October 2025; The Guardian, December 2025; TIME, January 2026). The American Immigration Lawyers Association has described the offer in strongly negative terms.
Our own view is less alarmed than that, and we should say why. Immigration lawyers compare notes constantly, and in the professional groups we belong to, practitioners now regularly report clients who left through the program and received the payment — in the cases we have seen described, by electronic transfer on arrival. We do not believe the government is trying to avoid paying people. The early failures look, from here, like a new program’s disbursement problems and eligibility mismatches rather than a design.
That is still not a promise. The flight and the orderly departure are real and verifiable before you go. The money is paid afterward, by a process you cannot audit, at an amount that has changed three times in sixteen months. Do not plan your arrival in your home country around the assumption that a specific dollar figure per person will be waiting. If it comes, and it probably will, treat it as a cushion. If your resettlement plan collapses without it, you do not have a plan.
Part Four: What are the two ways out of immigration court?
This is the part that is genuinely not explained anywhere else, and it is where most of the confusion lives. People assume that the app and voluntary departure are the same thing, or that you use the app to get voluntary departure from the judge. Neither is correct.
Lane 1 — Can I use CBP Home while my court case is pending?
DHS’s own FAQ answers this directly. If you have a pending case in immigration court, you can still participate, and — in DHS’s words — “DHS will file motion with the immigration court to dismiss your case.”
Note what this is not. The same page states that a departure through CBP Home “is not considered a withdrawal of an application for admission under 8 U.S.C. § 1225(a)(4) or a voluntary departure under 8 U.S.C. § 1229c.”
For someone whose asylum claim is going to fail, this lane is often cleaner than it first appears, for a reason that has nothing to do with the money:
- If the case is dismissed, there is no removal order. That matters enormously. Under INA § 212(a)(9)(A), a person ordered removed — or who departs while a removal order is outstanding — is inadmissible for five, ten, or twenty years depending on the posture, and needs the government’s consent to reapply before that period runs. A dismissal produces none of that.
- There is no voluntary departure bond to post and no departure deadline enforced by INA § 240B(d), which imposes a civil penalty of $1,000 to $5,000 and a ten-year bar on several forms of relief if a person granted voluntary departure fails to leave on time.
- The travel is arranged and paid for.
- The app generates a record of your departure.
The cost is that you are relying on DHS to actually file the motion, on the court to grant it, and on the program to perform. That is a real risk, and it is the reason this lane needs a lawyer coordinating it rather than a person clicking through an app alone.
Lane 2 — How does voluntary departure from the judge work?
Formal voluntary departure is the traditional route, and it remains the right answer in some cases — particularly where DHS will not agree to dismiss, where you want a court-fixed departure window, or where the posture of the case makes a judicial order preferable to an administrative arrangement. It comes in two forms.
Before the case concludes (INA § 240B(a); 8 CFR § 1240.26(b)). The regulation requires that you request it at or before the master calendar hearing at which the case is first calendared for a merits hearing; that you make no other requests for relief, or withdraw them; that you concede removability; and that you waive appeal. The grant cannot exceed 120 days. DHS counsel may stipulate to a grant at any point before proceedings conclude — which is exactly the negotiation an attorney conducts with the ICE trial attorney.
At the conclusion of proceedings (INA § 240B(b); 8 CFR § 1240.26(c)). Here the judge must find at least one year of physical presence before the Notice to Appear was served, five years of good moral character, no disqualifying convictions, and clear and convincing evidence that you have the means and the intention to depart. The grant cannot exceed 60 days, and a bond of not less than $500 must be posted with the ICE Field Office Director within five business days of the order.
Notice the trade-off. Pre-conclusion voluntary departure requires giving up your other applications and your appeal — which is not a real cost when the applications were going to fail anyway, and is a serious cost when they were not. That single sentence is why this decision belongs to a lawyer who has actually read your file.
What happens if I get voluntary departure and don’t leave?
This is not a formality, and the government does not forget. In Matter of R-P-L-, 29 I&N Dec. 859 (BIA 2026), decided on August 28, 2026, the Board upheld a civil monetary penalty imposed on a man who had been granted voluntary departure and did not leave. The immigration judge granted voluntary departure in December 2003. DHS imposed the penalty — $3,000 — in September 2025, and the Board sustained it. (Read the decision.)
Twenty-two years. If you accept a voluntary departure order and then stay, the penalty under INA § 240B(d) — $1,000 to $5,000, plus ten years of ineligibility for several forms of relief — is not a theoretical risk that fades with time. It is a debt the government can still collect two decades later.
There is an uncomfortable symmetry worth noticing. The penalty in that case was $3,000. That is also the exit bonus the Department of Homeland Security advertises today for leaving through CBP Home. Leave when you said you would and the government may pay you; stay past the date and the government may bill you — and in both directions, it is the same number.
How would a lawyer sequence the two lanes?
The two lanes are not mutually exclusive in practice, and the coordination is the work. An attorney handling this would ordinarily: obtain your complete court record so the posture is known rather than assumed; contact the ICE Office of the Principal Legal Advisor to learn whether DHS will move to dismiss or will stipulate to voluntary departure; register in CBP Home only once the court side is understood; and time the departure so that no deadline — a voluntary-departure period, a bond, an ICE check-in — is missed while travel is being arranged. Doing these in the wrong order is how a person ends up with a removal order they did not need.
Part Five: What does leaving actually cost me?
Here is where advice in both directions goes wrong. The government implies that leaving preserves a future path. Some advocates say that leaving triggers an automatic ten-year bar. The first is misleading. The second is not what the statute says — but it is, for most people reading this, what the outcome will be. The distinction matters, because the people it does not apply to need to know who they are.
Does leaving trigger the ten-year bar?
INA § 212(a)(9)(B) makes a person who accrued more than 180 days of unlawful presence and then departs inadmissible for three years, and a person who accrued one year or more inadmissible for ten. Unlawful presence is not simply “time in the United States,” and the statute contains three exceptions that matter to this population:
- A pending asylum application. No period during which a person “has a bona fide application for asylum pending” counts toward unlawful presence.
- Unless there was unauthorized work. That exception is lost if the applicant “was employed without authorization in the United States” during the period.
- Age. No period in which a person is under 18 counts toward unlawful presence at all.
Why does the asylum exception usually collapse in practice?
Read those first two together against how this actually goes, because the second swallows the first for most people.
An asylum applicant cannot even file for work authorization until the application has been pending 150 days, and cannot be approved before 180 days. That is six months, at a minimum, before a lawful paycheck is possible — and in the current backlog, often considerably longer while the application is adjudicated and the card is produced.
Now ask the practical question. A person who fled a country with what they could carry, who arrived owing money to whoever moved them, who has children to feed and rent due in thirty days — how does that person get through six months with no lawful way to work? The honest answer, in our experience, is that most of them work. Not all, and not always for the whole period. But the person who sat out half a year on savings is the exception, not the rule.
So the realistic expectation for most adults in this situation is that the asylum exception does not protect them, that unlawful presence accrued, and that departure triggers the ten-year bar. We state that plainly rather than letting anyone leave on a comfortable assumption.
Who actually escapes the bar?
We ask it; we do not assume the answer. Some people genuinely do not fall into the pattern — someone supported by relatives already here, someone who filed quickly and got an EAD before taking any work, someone who arrived with resources, someone whose entire period of presence has been under 18. For those people the arithmetic is different and can be dramatically better, and it would be a serious disservice to tell them they are barred when they are not.
Work performed with a valid employment authorization document is authorized. Work performed before the card issued generally was not. That single line, applied to your actual dates, is what determines the answer — and it is why this analysis cannot be done from memory or from a friend’s experience. Our page on unlawful presence explains the counting rules in more detail.
Do my children get a bar too?
For a parent, this may be the most important paragraph on the page. Children who leave with you generally leave clean. A minor accrues no unlawful presence while under 18, and no unauthorized-work problem changes that. The bar that attaches to you does not attach to your eleven-year-old, who can apply for a visa as an adult on the same footing as anyone else from your country. Whatever this decision costs you, it does not have to cost them — and that fact should be part of how you weigh it.
Is a ten-year bar permanent?
A ten-year bar is not literally permanent. INA § 212(a)(9)(B)(v) allows a waiver for the spouse or son or daughter of a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident who can show extreme hardship to that citizen or resident spouse or parent. If you later marry a U.S. citizen, that door exists. Absent a qualifying relative, it does not — and you should plan your life on the assumption that this is a long goodbye rather than a pause.
What happens to my asylum application when I leave?
DHS states plainly that a person who leaves while an asylum application is pending “generally will be presumed to have abandoned their application.” If the claim was going to fail, that is the point rather than a cost. But understand that you are not preserving it for later.
Part Six: Can I really “come back the right legal way”?
The government’s advertising says that people who leave now “reserve the chance to come back to the U.S. the right legal way,” and the CBP Home benefits list states that leaving voluntarily “may improve future immigration options.”
Set against that, from the same agency, on the same page, is this answer to the question of whether CBP Home offers expedited visas, parole, or help with future application fees: “CBP Home does not include benefits or preferences for future applications at this time.”
Those statements cannot all be doing honest work at once. Notice, though, which channel hedges: the program page says “may improve” and “at this time,” while the social media account says flatly that you “reserve the chance to come back.” When the agency’s own channels disagree, treat the program page — the one that qualifies its promises and that you can screenshot and hold it to — as the more careful of the two, and treat the social posts as advertising. And when you add what the law requires of a future visa applicant, the marketing gets thinner still.
What does coming back actually look like today?
It depends on which of three situations you leave in, and none of the three has a fast lane. Here is what is on the ground as of the date on this page.
Situation one: no bar attached to you. Suppose you are one of the people the last section described — you never worked without authorization, or you were under 18 the whole time — so no unlawful-presence bar follows you out the door. You are not barred. You are also not admitted. To come back you still need a visa, and for a visit that means a consular officer applying INA § 214(b), which provides that every applicant “shall be presumed to be an immigrant” until they satisfy the officer, at the time of the application, that they qualify for nonimmigrant status. The burden is on you, in a short interview, with no appeal.
Now consider what your file says about you. You entered without a visa. You asked to remain. You stayed for several years. Whatever the humanitarian merits, the record establishes — in the specific terms the officer is required to evaluate — an intention to live in the United States. Overcoming that presumption with that history is difficult, and in our experience consular officers are unforgiving about prior immigration violations. For a person who was here for years and left, the consular officer, not the statute, is the wall. That would change only if the Department of State specifically instructed its officers to issue visitor visas or border crossing cards to people who left through CBP Home. No such instruction exists, and nothing on the DHS page claims one does.
Situation two: a bar attached to you. This is most adults. You are inadmissible for ten years under INA § 212(a)(9)(B). The only waiver Congress wrote — § 212(a)(9)(B)(v) — is for the spouse or son or daughter of a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident, on a showing of extreme hardship to that citizen or resident spouse or parent. If you do not have that relative, there is no waiver to apply for, and no agency can invent one. Your realistic path back is an immigrant visa through a qualifying relative or an employer, filed after the ten years run or with that waiver in hand. Those take years and require someone in the United States to petition for you.
Situation three: a removal order. If you leave with a final order outstanding, DHS’s page says the departure “will generally constitute a self-removal/execution of the outstanding removal order.” You are then inadmissible under INA § 212(a)(9)(A) for five, ten, or twenty years depending on your posture, and you need the government’s advance consent to reapply before that period ends — on top of any unlawful-presence bar. This is the situation the sequencing in Part Four exists to avoid, and it is the reason a dismissal is worth more than the money.
Could a future administration create a fast lane?
Not the one being advertised — and this is where we part from the government’s framing most sharply. Every wall described above is in the statute. The § 214(b) presumption, the three- and ten-year bars, the list of relatives who can seek a waiver, the categories and annual numbers of immigrant visas, and the § 212(a)(9)(A) consent requirement were all written by Congress. An executive order cannot repeal them, a regulation cannot contradict them, and an agency FAQ cannot promise around them. A “preference for people who left through CBP Home” that let a barred person back inside ten years, or created a visa category that does not exist, would require legislation. None has been introduced.
What the executive branch could do on its own is narrower, and you should know its limits. It could instruct consular officers on how to weigh a CBP Home departure when they exercise judgment under § 214(b) — which would help only people with no bar, and would inform the officer’s discretion rather than override the presumption. It could offer parole under INA § 212(d)(5), which is permission to be physically present, not a visa and not an admission; it is revocable at will, and the parole programs of the last several years were ended by the administration that followed the one that created them. Neither of those is a path to a green card, and neither exists for CBP Home participants today.
So the honest summary is this. As of the date on this page there is no rule, no regulation, no published guidance, and no form that gives a CBP Home participant any advantage on return. What exists is an advertising line and a program FAQ that contradicts it. The strongest thing a future government could lawfully add without Congress is a discretionary and revocable one. Decide based on what the law is today, and revisit the question with a lawyer if the rules actually change.
None of this is a reason not to leave. It is a reason not to leave believing something that is not true. A person who goes home understanding that this is likely permanent can make good decisions about what to sell, what to ship, where to send the children to school, and how to use whatever money they have saved. A person who goes home believing they will be back on a tourist visa next year makes none of those decisions, and the disappointment falls hardest on the children.
Part Seven: When should I not do this?
Do not treat this page as a recommendation. It is an explanation of one option, and it is the wrong option for many people. Talk to a lawyer before doing anything if any of the following is true:
- Your asylum claim may actually be good. Persecution connected to political opinion, religion, ethnicity, or a genuine particular social group; a state actor or a group the state will not control; physical evidence or medical records. Weak-looking applications are sometimes strong cases that were written badly by someone who did not know what mattered.
- You are a crime victim, or you were abused by a U.S. citizen or resident spouse or parent. U visas, T visas, and VAWA self-petitions exist for people who often do not realize they qualify.
- You have a U.S. citizen or permanent resident spouse, parent, or adult child — or a child approaching 21.
- You are afraid of what happens on arrival. Withholding of removal and Convention Against Torture protection have higher burdens than asylum but no one-year deadline and no protected-ground requirement for CAT.
- You have a criminal record. Departure interacts with criminal grounds of inadmissibility in ways that can convert a ten-year problem into a permanent one.
- You already have a final removal order. DHS’s page states that departure in that posture “will generally constitute a self-removal/execution of the outstanding removal order,” which is a different legal event with different consequences. Our page on returning after deportation explains what that involves.
DHS itself says participants “should consult with an immigration attorney or legal counsel prior to indicating the intent to self-depart.” On that, we agree with the government.
What do we actually do with a case like this?
We start by getting the record — the immigration court file and, where needed, the government’s file — because a decision this consequential should not rest on what anyone remembers about a hearing. Then we do the assessment: what the asylum claim is actually worth, whether a pending motion can be beaten, and whether beating it accomplishes anything. If relief exists that the client did not know about, we say so. If it does not, we say that too, in plain language, and we count the unlawful presence honestly rather than guessing at it.
If the client decides to go, the work is coordination: dealing with the ICE attorney, choosing between dismissal and voluntary departure, keeping the court’s deadlines and the app’s timeline from colliding, and making sure that nothing in the sequence produces a removal order that was avoidable.
What we will not do is take money to litigate a case we have told you will lose. Our strategy consultation exists to answer this kind of question before you spend anything else. We represent clients in immigration court throughout Montana, North Dakota, Wyoming, and the Rocky Mountain West, and this conversation — the honest one about whether to fight or to go — is one we have regularly.
If you are facing this decision, contact us. Bring your court papers and your dates. The answer depends on them.
Program terms described on this page were verified against the Department of Homeland Security’s CBP Home page on September 7, 2026. The stipend amount, eligibility terms, and program availability have changed several times since May 2025 and can change again without notice. Confirm current terms directly with DHS before acting. This page is general information about United States immigration law, not legal advice about your case, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship.
