Trump Admin Sues Woman Who Failed To Self Deport For Nearly $1 Million

The Trump administration sued a Virginia woman for almost $1 million as part of an escalating drive to get undocumented immigrants to leave the U.S. by levying court-imposed fines.

The lawsuit, filed last week in U.S. District Court in Richmond, seeks $941,114 plus interest from Marta Alicia Ramirez Veliz for allegedly failing to leave the U.S. for more than three years after a Justice Department appeals panel ruled against her in an immigration case in 2022.

Officials appear to have arrived at the whopping sum by imposing a $998 daily fine for each of the 943 days that passed between the Board of Immigration Appeals dismissing Ramirez Veliz’s appeal and Immigration and Customs Enforcement sending her a formal bill last April.

The Trump administration set up a new process last year to assess the fines. Lawyers challenging that system say the penalty for Ramirez Veliz appears to be the highest sought among dozens of similar lawsuits the administration has brought in recent months.

“That does sound like the largest number we have heard when we were tracking this,” said Charles Moore, a lawyer with the public interest law group Public Justice. “We know that the amounts were as low as $3,000 and as high as several hundred thousand but, no, we hadn't heard of anything close to $1 million.”

Legal experts say they’ve strained to find any patterns in the new lawsuits or tens of thousands of bills ICE has sent out, although attorneys say the assessments often go to immigrants who have been fastidious about keeping their addresses updated in government files and checking in with immigration officials as directed.

“They are people who have been interacting with the system attempting to obtain [legal] status through the proper procedure. It seems many people in this situation are folks who are getting these fines,” Moore said.

Efforts to contact Ramirez Veliz for comment for this story were unsuccessful. The lawsuit against her describes her as “an individual and noncitizen residing in Chesterfield County, Virginia,” just south of Richmond. It does not provide her nationality or discuss any legal arguments she made against her deportation, which was ordered by an immigration court in 2019.

A Justice Department official said the lawsuit appeared to be the first of its kind filed in the Eastern District of Virginia. POLITICO located one lawsuit filed last week against a man living in Florida that demands over $717,000 for failing to depart the country. Other lawsuits, filed in California and Texas, seek amounts ranging from $3,000 to over $292,000.

A statute of limitations that applies to the fines means an immigrant who remains in the country for five years or more after being ordered to leave could face a maximum penalty of about $1.8 million, although it’s unclear if any of those fines have led to lawsuits.

A law passed by Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton in 1996 authorized civil penalties for immigrants who “willfully” fail to leave the country as directed.

The provision remained unimplemented for two decades, but during President Donald Trump’s first term, ICE began to assess fines on undocumented immigrants. However, officials never turned to lawsuits to enforce the meager fines that were assessed. Ultimately, ICE imposed 20 fines totaling almost $84,000. From those invoices, ICE collected a total of $4,215, according to data gathered by groups challenging the policy.

The Biden administration discontinued the practice, with Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas concluding there was “no indication” that the fines actually induced people to leave the country.

However, an executive order Trump signed last year on the first day of his second term, instructed immigration officials to resume the use of financial penalties. Immigration authorities issued almost 10,000 such fines through June of last year and then adopted new regulations aimed at allowing more fines to be issued “quickly and at scale.”

“The law doesn’t enforce itself; there must be consequences for breaking it,” DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said at the time. “President Trump and Secretary Noem are standing up for law and order and making our government more effective and efficient at enforcing the American people’s immigration laws.”

By August, the number of fines issued had risen to 21,500 and the sum assessed skyrocketed over $6 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal. A DHS spokesperson did not respond to a request for updated figures.

In addition to the lawsuits, the federal government has the ability to enforce the penalties through wage garnishment, seizing and selling assets and by calling in private debt collectors. The government can also insist that any uncollected penalties owed by those who are deported be paid in the unlikely event they are allowed to return to the U.S.

Immigrant rights advocates say the huge tallies of fines are fanciful because many or most of those sent such bills work in minimum wage jobs. A class action lawsuit filed in November contends that the new fine mechanism is illegal because it denies due process to immigrants targeted for the penalties.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Boston, also contends that federal officials are ignoring the part of the law that says the fines should only be applied to people who “willfully” fail to leave.

“They're using the law in a way that it was never intended to apply,” Moore said. “They're trying to do it in a way that really railroads people's rights. … This is not about collecting or remediating anything. The sole point here is to intimidate and scare people into leaving the country.”