He's Undocumented. She's Not.

"There are an estimated 14 million people living in the U.S. illegally, and only so many ways to find them. Even with ICE's roughly $28 billion annual budget, even with a massive recruitment campaign and the rapid deployment of Border Patrol, the Trump administration may not be able to accomplish its goal of 1 million deportations every year. So the administration has started to lean more heavily on a different strategy: asking migrants outright to leave voluntarily."

"Matt Borowski is an undocumented immigrant from Poland, but he did not tell Maddie Polovick that until their second date. By then, she was already falling in love. They got married five years ago on a mountain peak in Colorado and settled in Chicago, close to her best friend and some of her family. By the time Border Patrol showed up in Chicago this fall, Borowski's few legal paths to citizenship had dried up."

An estimated 14 million undocumented people live in the U.S., straining enforcement capacity despite large ICE budgets and deployments. The administration's deportation targets proved difficult to meet, prompting a pivot toward encouraging voluntary departure through a $200 million DHS advertising effort and public calls for "reverse migration." Individual lives face the policy consequences: one undocumented Polish immigrant in Chicago confronts evaporating legal options, Border Patrol attention, and the agonizing choice whether to leave the country he and his wife hoped to call home. The campaign reframes enforcement from forced removal to persuasion to exit.

Read at The Atlantic