$998 a Day, Backdated Five Years. The Feds Revived a 1996 Law and Started Mailing Deportees Million-Dollar Bills.

In 2025 the federal government dusted off a law almost nobody had used in 30 years and turned it into a collections machine. Under a civil-penalty provision Congress wrote in 1996, the Department of Homeland Security began mailing notices to immigrants who had stayed in the United States after a final order of removal — charging them $998 for every single day they failed to leave.

The fines are applied retroactively, up to a statutory cap of five years. Run the arithmetic and the number is staggering: $998 a day for five years comes to roughly $1,821,350. Some people who have lived here for two decades, who check in with ICE every year, have opened the mail to find a seven-figure government bill. By the spring of 2026, DHS said it had issued more than 65,000 such fines totaling tens of billions of dollars.

The policy has a deliberate escape hatch. Self-deport through the government’s CBP Home app and the fines are forgiven — plus a free flight and a cash bonus. That is the whole design: make staying financially impossible, make leaving free, and let the math do the deportation. This page lays out the law, the dollar figures, the named cases, and the legal fight — source by source.

• $998 per day — the daily civil penalty for willfully failing to depart after a final removal order — the 1996 statute's $500/day base, inflation-adjusted · Source: NBC News; Federal Register; 8 U.S.C. § 1324d
• up to $1,821,350 — the maximum a single fine reaches — $998/day backdated to the statutory five-year cap · Source: American Immigration Council; CBS News
• 65,000+ fines — the number of civil-penalty notices ICE issued between Jan. 20, 2025 and mid-March 2026, seeking tens of billions of dollars · Source: NBC News; The Marshall Project; CIS
• Unused since 1996 — the penalty authority sat dormant for nearly 30 years — used briefly in 2018, then revived at scale under the second Trump administration · Source: CIS; Reuters via NBC News
• Forgiven on self-deport — DHS waives all failure-to-depart fines for anyone who leaves via the CBP Home app — which also offers a free flight and a cash exit bonus · Source: DHS, June 9, 2025; The Hill
• ~1.4 million — the population of immigrants under final removal orders who are potentially exposed to the daily fine · Source: NBC News (Reuters documents)

The hook is a single provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act: 8 U.S.C. § 1324d, also known as INA § 274D, titled simply “Civil penalties for failure to depart.” Congress added it in 1996 as part of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. The text authorizes a civil penalty against any noncitizen subject to a final removal order who “willfully fails or refuses” to depart, to apply in good faith for travel documents, or to present for removal — set at “not more than $500” for each day in violation. Inflation adjustments under a separate penalty-update rule have pushed that ceiling to $998 a day.

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For almost three decades, the statute was effectively a dead letter. The Center for Immigration Studies’ Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge, noted that neither the legacy INS nor DHS appears to have ever actually imposed these civil fines before the first Trump administration tested the tool in 2018 — and even then only on a handful of high-profile activists. What changed in 2025 was scale. A January 2025 executive order directed DHS and the Treasury to assess and collect these penalties systematically, and the agency built the machinery to do it. A law written in 1996 became, for the first time, a mass instrument.

“Any alien subject to a final order of removal who willfully fails or refuses to depart shall pay a civil penalty of not more than $500 to the Commissioner for each day the alien is in violation.”

8 U.S.C. § 1324d(a) — Civil penalties for failure to depart (enacted 1996)

The figures are not abstractions, and they compound fast. At $998 a day, a single year of non-departure runs to $364,270. Backdated to the five-year statutory limit, the bill lands near $1,821,350 — the number that has shown up, almost to the dollar, on notices reported by NBC News and CBS News. An early high-profile notice reviewed by CBS News in May 2025 cited a Honduran mother of three in Florida whose removal order dated to 2005, her bill capped near $1,821,350 under the five-year limit.

The aggregate is just as striking. By DHS’s own accounting, ICE issued more than 65,000 civil fine notices between January 20, 2025 and mid-March 2026 — seeking, by some tallies, tens of billions of dollars. The Justice Department has backed the notices with more than 50 civil lawsuits in federal courts from California to Florida, and The Marshall Project reported that some balances have ballooned past $2,300,000 once private debt collectors tacked on fees and interest. The government has also moved to seize property and intercept tax refunds from people who do not pay.

On June 27, 2025, DHS and DOJ published an interim final rule in the Federal Register to make the fines faster and harder to fight. The rule lets the government serve a Notice of Intention to Fine by ordinary mail rather than in person, and it shortens the window a noncitizen has to respond or appeal — cut from 30 days down to 15. In plain terms: a life-altering bill can now arrive in a mailbox, and the clock to contest it runs out in two weeks.

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The administration frames this as overdue enforcement of a law already on the books. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem (R) and Trump border czar Tom Homan have cast the penalties as the stick to pair with the carrot of voluntary departure: leave on your own and the slate is wiped clean, or stay and watch the meter run. The legal authority is genuinely old and genuinely valid — this is not an invented power. The fight, as Section 05 lays out, is over whether the way it is being applied to people with pending cases and supervised check-ins is lawful.

The fines do not stand alone. They are the punitive half of a two-sided pitch built around the CBP Home app — the rebranded version of the Biden-era CBP One. On June 9, 2025, DHS announced that any immigrant who self-deports through the app would have their failure-to-depart fines forgiven entirely. On top of forgiveness, the program offers a free flight home and a cash “exit bonus” that DHS has advertised at figures ranging from $1,000 to $3,000 during holiday promotions, settling around $2,600.

DHS says the strategy is working: the department has claimed more than two million voluntary self-deportations since January 2025 and tens of thousands of CBP Home enrollments. Secretary Kristi Noem (R) has fronted a reported $200 million ad campaign urging immigrants to download the app and leave. Critics — including the attorneys now suing — call the “voluntary” label misleading: when the alternative is a seven-figure bill, asset seizure, and a 15-day clock, the choice to leave is less an invitation than a financial ultimatum.

The abstraction breaks down at the level of individual notices, and that is where the legal challenge took shape. NBC News reported on Wendy Ortiz, a meatpacking-plant worker in Pennsylvania, who received a notice fining her the maximum $1,821,350 even as she was actively seeking humanitarian protection in immigration court. A separate plaintiff, identified in court papers only as “Nancy M.” to shield her from retaliation, had a removal order but also an active order of supervision — meeting with immigration authorities every year while pursuing legal residency — and was fined anyway.

In November 2025, two women in that position filed a class-action lawsuit in Massachusetts, arguing the penalties are unconstitutional and would drive them and thousands of others “into ruinous debt.” The Marshall Project documented a still sharper example: a green-card applicant married to an active-duty U.S. service member, with four U.S.-citizen children, whose joint tax refund was seized by the Treasury. The plaintiffs’ core complaint is not that the 1996 statute is fake — it is real — but that applying it retroactively to people with pending cases, supervised release, and no chance to be heard offends due process and the Eighth Amendment’s bar on excessive fines.

“ICE is terrorizing individuals without even having to go pick them up. They are terrorizing them by sending these notices.”

Michelle Sanchez, immigration attorney, to CBS News (May 2025)

An honest account names the soft spots. The underlying authority is not a fabrication: 8 U.S.C. § 1324d has been on the books since 1996, it plainly authorizes a daily penalty for willful failure to depart, and a final removal order is a lawful judicial outcome. People hit with these fines were, by definition, ordered removed. The administration is exercising a power Congress actually granted. And the fine is, genuinely, forgivable — the off-ramp is real, not a trap with no exit.

But the load-bearing tensions are also real. The statute hinges on a willful failure to depart, yet notices have gone to people with pending motions, supervised check-ins, and active applications — the opposite of someone hiding from the law. Backdating a $998-a-day penalty five years to produce a $1,821,350bill, then giving the recipient 15 days to contest it by mail, is a steep process for a civil penalty. No court has yet ruled the program lawful or unlawful; the Massachusetts class action and the DOJ’s collection suits are the venues where that gets decided. Until then, the fairest description is the accurate one: a real law, used at unprecedented scale, now being tested in court.

The federal government took a 1996 civil-penalty provision that had sat unused for a generation and turned it into the financial engine of a self-deportation campaign. The mechanics are simple and brutal: $998 a day, backdated up to five years, capable of producing a $1,821,350bill that arrives by mail with a two-week clock — unless you leave through the CBP Home app, in which case it all disappears and the government pays your way out. More than 65,000 notices have gone out, lawsuits are flying in both directions, and the constitutional question of whether you can fine someone into exile is now in front of the courts. We’ll track the class action, the DOJ collection suits, and whether the separately proposed increase in in-absentia removal penalties takes effect.

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