More than 400 people in S.F. have sought to self-deport, many with no good options

Three years ago, Victoria Hernandez fled Colombia after what she called an attack on her life by members of an armed group.

She had previously cared for some of its members in her job as a licensed nurse, she said. Then, she said, they began to threaten her.

On the night of the attack, men carrying guns ambushed her car while she drove home with her young son, she said. Hernandez managed to escape by speeding down a dark mountainous path into the Colombian countryside. She and her son stashed the car and waited in the dark by a rural home.

It was then that Hernandez (a pseudonym) decided to flee the country and build a new life in San Francisco. Three years later, despite the danger, she’s headed back to Colombia.

Hernandez is one of about 429 immigrants in San Francisco who, between January 2025 and February 2026, has sought to self-deport, according to the Transactional Access Clearinghouse from Syracuse University.

In January, after months fighting for asylum, Hernandez received news that the Department of Homeland Security sought to send her family’s asylum case to Honduras or Ecuador, countries that she has never visited, effectively seeking to deport her and her family to seek asylum elsewhere.

Rather than face deportation to an unknown place, she’s decided to leave the United States altogether.

“I didn’t see another way forward,” Hernandez told Mission Local in Spanish. Hernandez faced the prospect of either spending thousands on an attorney to fight for an appeal, or accept the government’s offer. 

“I had to make the decision to voluntarily depart, because above all else, there is a fear of arrest and detention as a woman and as a mother,” she told Mission Local. “I have a baby and a 13-year-old son, so I think to myself: If they give me a deportation order or arrest me, what would happen to my children?” 

On a recent Thursday, Hernandez stood before Judge Frank A. Seminario inside the San Francisco immigration court at 630 Sansome St., took a deep breath, exhaled, and told the judge she was choosing to leave. 

Hernandez now has less than 120 days to depart the United States with her young children. 

1,347 cases in San Francisco 

The Department of Homeland Security filed “pretermit motions” — requests to move asylum cases to third countries that have agreements with the United States — in at least 1,347 different cases from January 2025 to late February 2026, according to the researchers Joseph Gunther and Brandon Marrow, who have been studying the data from across the country.  

Those motions ground to a halt three weeks ago after a federal directive instructed ICE attorneys to stop filing them (the directive gave no rationale for this change). But they have already affected hundreds of Bay Area asylum seekers. 

According to a report by Gunther and Marrow, pretermit motions began to explode across the nation in November 2025, with some federal attorneys filing 1,000 motions per day.

Between January 2025 and January 2026, immigration judges granted 23,000 of these motions nationally, though the majority of asylum-seekers have appealed, according to Gunther and Marrow.

Nicole Gorney, an immigration attorney for the nonprofit VIDAS, said Judge Seminario, one of the few remaining immigration judges in San Francisco, now presents asylum-seekers with the option to self-deport in almost every pretermit case. It’s a marked departure from the approach of many former judges in San Francisco, most of whom were either fired or resigned this past year. 

“The big picture is that the administration is using all different types of tactics to try to convince people to give up,” said David Hausman, the co-director of the University of California, Berkeley’s Deportation Data Project.

He and his team have studied the rise in voluntary departures, and their data has been used extensively to study the outcome of immigration enforcement in President Donald Trump’s second term.

Blaine Bookey, the legal director at the University of California Law, San Francisco, said one of the chief tactics from the administration is to flood the zone with pretermit motions.

Faced with these motions, asylum-seekers have to weigh a risk: If they hire an attorney and fight through a pricey appeal, they could lose and find themselves deported to an unknown country. Gorney said the appeals process can cost $20,000 or more. 

Or they can accept the government’s offer and leave to a known destination. While a formal removal order can bar one’s future re-entry into the county for 10 years or make them ineligible for immigration benefits, voluntary departure lets you re-enter the country without penalty. 

Hernandez, for her part, said it was no choice at all.

“If I hadn’t accepted voluntary departure, they would give me a removal order and I would have to pay for another appeal, and another appeal, knowing that I have no way to pay for it, and that they already denied my first appeal.”

Victor Nieblas Pradis, the former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said immigration judges sometimes push voluntary departure even when one has credible fears of violence.

At a hearing in mid-March, an immigration judge asked Pradis’ client if they had considered self-deporting. Pradis said voluntary departure would not apply due to their client’s active asylum case. 

But the judge proceeded to walk through the process of self-deporting in an “intimidating” manner anyway, Pradis said. If he had not been there, he said, his client would have felt pressured to take the deal.

“It dawned on me, in that moment, that if they didn’t have representation, it’s more likely than not that the judge would have convinced them to take voluntary departure,” Pradis said.

Uncertain path forward

Hernandez submitted an application to voluntarily depart at the end of January through the Customs and Border Patrol mobile app. 

The voluntary departure app is designed to be inviting. When you open it, you’re greeted by a light-blue screen with an image of a family — a man and woman holding hands with a child between them — and the words “Getting you home quickly and easily.”

It promises an exit bonus of $2,600, and “free travel home.”

The process has, so far, required Hernandez to share basic travel plans.

“I filled out the application on the app and the email they sent with many questions like, ‘Who will you travel with? Do you have a passport? Do you have pets? Do you need accommodations for mobility needs?’” she said. 

She filled it out in early January. In late March she called Customs and Border Protection to ask a question about her U.S. citizen child. She is still awaiting a response.

Other immigrants like Hernandez have filed for voluntary departure through the CBP app, only to be left in limbo by the federal government, often receiving departure dates without any further followup. 

Immigration advocates like the International Rescue Committee also warn that there is no legal guarantee that asylum-seekers will receive travel reimbursement or the exit bonus. 

Once the process is complete, the Department of Homeland Security says on its website that reimbursement of the bonus and travel expenses will take place when the asylum-seeker has arrived at their destination. Various reports show that some have not received payment, while others have faced hurdles to collecting payment. 

While Hernandez waits for her voluntary removal to be accepted, her anxieties about conditions inside Colombia  remain. 

Tumultuous conditions 

Within the last two years in Colombia, armed groups that operate illegal economies, like the Clan del Golfo, the ELN and Estado Mayor Central, have grown significantly, according to the Bogotá-based research organization Ideas for Peace Foundation.

As a result, kidnappings and forced member recruitment have increased, despite the Colombian government’s attempts at peace talks.

Between January and August 2025, 1.4 million Colombians were victims of organized violence. It is a country with one of the highest rates of internal displacement globally, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Internal relocation within the country has become increasingly difficult as the armed groups have expanded their territories to areas that previously went largely untouched.

While Hernandez’s parents remain in her hometown, she will not be able to return there due to the continued presence of the armed group that attacked her, Hernandez said.

“I will have to find a place with very few people, and where no one knows me.” As of right now, she said, she has no idea where she will go. 

In past years, asylum-seekers have been killed upon returning to their countries of origin.

In early February, four Haitian women, age 27 to 31, were found dead at the Haiti-Dominican Republic border after being deported  from Puerto Rico.

On Feb. 15, the Colombian asylum-seeker Brayner Estrada was found dead in Medellin, with a bullet wound in his head, only nine days after being deported from Georgia. His family reported that he had an active asylum case but signed a voluntary departure order while detained by ICE. 

Hernandez is aware of the danger.  “I hear the news, and I have so much fear,” she said. “Now, I will be arriving with one more child and I don’t know how to protect myself, protect my children.”