More than one in four completed immigration removal cases among detained illegal immigrants ended in voluntary departure last year — a higher share than in any year on record. By December 2025, that figure climbed to 38%, nearly double the pace from earlier in the year, as the rate grew almost every month.
The numbers tell a straightforward story. According to CBS News, bond approval rates for detainees collapsed from 59% in 2024 to 30% in 2025. Asylum grant rates, which exceeded 50% each month from 2022 through 2024, fell to 29% by December. Faced with those odds, detained illegal immigrants are increasingly choosing to leave rather than fight cases they expect to lose.
And that's exactly how enforcement is supposed to work.
For years, the immigration court system functioned as a conveyor belt into the American interior. Claim asylum at the border, get released on bond, disappear into the country, and wait years for a hearing that might never come — or that might rubber-stamp a claim with a better-than-coin-flip approval rate. The incentive structure rewarded illegal entry. The system was designed not to work.
What's changed is that the current administration has moved to subject anyone who entered the country illegally to mandatory detention — not just those caught near the border. Judges' authority to grant a bond in those cases has been curtailed. About 73,000 people were held in ICE detention by mid-January, the highest level ever recorded by DHS.
When people who broke the law to enter the country face actual detention rather than a court date and a bus ticket, the calculus changes. The surge in voluntary departures isn't a mystery. It's the predictable result of a system that finally imposes real costs on illegal entry.
CBS News built its story around Vilma Palacios, a 22-year-old Honduran national who arrived in the U.S. at age six, graduated from nursing school at Louisiana State University last June, and was arrested by ICE one month later at a local police station. She spent six months detained in Basile, Louisiana, before agreeing in late December to return to Honduras.
Her story is sympathetic — and that's precisely why it was chosen for the article. But the facts underneath it tell a different story than the one CBS intended.
Palacios and her family were apprehended at the border in 2010 and detained for a month. They were released and pursued an asylum case in the years following. That case was administratively closed in 2015, when she was 12 — meaning it was taken off the docket indefinitely. Not granted. Not resolved. Shelved. She spent the next decade in the country without legal status.
A DHS spokesperson told CBS that Palacios "freely admitted to being in the U.S. illegally" and "never sought or gained any legal status." Palacios pushed back, claiming she had been awaiting a work permit renewal when arrested — a claim CBS did not independently verify.
Her bond request was denied by an immigration judge. A judge later granted voluntary departure. She was flown to Honduras in restraints, which she described in visceral terms:
"It's something that I feel like it's very inhumane, the way that we are shackled and brought to our country. It doesn't seem like it's a voluntary departure. It seemed that you're still being held as a criminal, kind of like a hostage."
The restraints during transport are standard procedure for removal flights — not a punishment unique to voluntary departure cases. But the framing is doing a lot of work here. Palacios lived in the United States for sixteen years. She built a life. None of that is in dispute. What's also not in dispute is that she had no legal status for the entirety of that time. The administrative closure of her family's asylum case in 2015 was not an approval. It was the system kicking the can down the road — and she remained illegally present while it gathered dust.
This is the hard edge of enforcement. Sympathetic individuals exist within a population of people who are, as a matter of law, in the country illegally. The existence of sympathetic cases is not an argument against enforcing the law. It's an argument for Congress to build a legal immigration system that doesn't leave people in permanent limbo — and for individuals to pursue legal pathways rather than hoping the system never catches up.
Legal advocates painted the surge in voluntary departures as a product of despair rather than rational decision-making. Jen Grant, a supervising attorney at the Legal Aid Society in New York, described detention conditions:
"The conditions in the detention centers have never ever been worse because they're so overcrowded."
She added:
"People have no hope. It's from seeing other people in court who fight their cases, who get their cases denied, who have bond hearings ... and then they get denied."
Grant also suggested judges may be afraid to rule out of step with the administration's deportation agenda. The Executive Office for Immigration Review pushed back on that characterization, stating that immigration judges "are independent adjudicators and decide all matters before them, including requests for voluntary departure, on a case-by-case basis, according to U.S. immigration law, regulations, and precedent decisions."
Here's what Grant actually described without realizing it: a system where illegal immigrants are witnessing other illegal immigrants lose their cases on the merits — and concluding that they'll lose too. That's not hopelessness born of cruelty. That's rational assessment born of watching the law get applied.
For years, the extraordinarily high asylum approval rates — over 50% monthly from 2022 to 2024 — created an expectation that the system would accommodate almost anyone who asked. The correction back toward 29% isn't the system breaking. It's the system recalibrating after years of permissiveness.
Another detainee, identified only as U.G., a Mexican national held for 13 months, described the psychological weight of extended detention:
"I couldn't fathom just continuing to sit there. Every day that I sit here, I'm choosing to sit here. I can sign and have them remove me in three days."
U.G. was reportedly relieved when a judge finally ordered her deportation. She had at one point tried to convince her own legal team to ask for her removal. She didn't opt for voluntary departure — she waited for a ruling — but her account underscores the same dynamic. When the legal prospects dim, people make pragmatic choices.
Immigration lawyer Christopher Kinnison, who has practiced in Louisiana for 15 years, put it plainly:
"They believe that the likelihood of them winning their case is so much lower than it ever used to be."
Lower than it used to be. That phrasing is revealing. "Used to be" means the Obama and Biden years, when catch-and-release was policy and asylum approval was closer to a default setting than a legal threshold. The baseline Kinnison is measuring against was itself the anomaly.
In December, a California district judge ruled that DHS's sweeping use of mandatory detention is unlawful. The chief immigration judge responded with guidance telling immigration judges the ruling was not binding, according to a memo obtained by the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
This is the familiar choreography of immigration enforcement under any Republican administration. The executive branch acts. A district judge in a friendly jurisdiction blocks. The administration pushes back through internal channels while the case works its way up. The legal battle will continue. In the meantime, the policy is producing exactly the results it was designed to produce — fewer illegal immigrants cycling through a revolving door and more facing the actual consequences of unlawful entry.
The administration has also fired dozens of immigration judges and moved to cut thousands of asylum cases short by requesting that judges send asylum seekers to third countries. These are aggressive moves. They are also moves that reflect what voters demanded: an immigration system that enforces its own rules.
The CBS analysis does not include those in expedited removal proceedings — immigrants who never received a hearing before a judge. The actual scope of departures is broader than the voluntary departure figures alone suggest. DHS, notably, did not respond to CBS inquiries about either the increase in voluntary departures or the expanded use of mandatory detention. The numbers spoke for themselves, and evidently, DHS was content to let them.
The left will frame this story as a humanitarian crisis — broken people giving up in a system stacked against them. The conservative read is simpler: illegal immigrants are encountering a legal system that finally functions as a legal system rather than a processing center. When the odds of gaming the system drop, fewer people try to game it.
Vilma Palacios is now volunteering at a toy drive in Honduras. She told CBS her dream is still to become a nurse in the United States. That's an admirable aspiration. The legal front door remains open. The window she climbed through at six years old — and stayed inside for sixteen years without status — is closed.
That distinction is the entire point.
