The Department of Homeland Security launched a $200 million advertising campaign this past spring that urged migrants to “self-deport,” dangling an offer that sounded like a darker version of a credit-card promotion. By formalizing their departure through a government app, CBP Home, participants could receive a free plane ticket and a $1,000 cash bonus.

Nearly nine months later, about 35,000 people have used CBP Home to leave the country, according to figures I obtained from two DHS officials who track the program. Given the cost of the advertising blitz, as well as the airfare and cash payments, it works out to about $7,500 per self-deportation.

The DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin wrote to me that the program, called Project Homecoming, has created “a smooth, efficient process for illegal aliens to return home” and that “tens of thousands” of participants have used CBP Home to depart. McLaughlin declined to say what DHS spends per self-deportation, but the department has estimated the cost of having ICE officers arrest, detain, and deport someone to be more than $17,000 per deportee.

The target audience for the pricey ads was not just potential deportees but also the president’s core supporters. After National Guard troops were shot, one of them fatally, near the White House last week, allegedly by an Afghan national, President Donald Trump said on social media that he wanted to “permanently pause migration from all third world countries” and called for “REVERSE MIGRATION,” which he later defined as “get ’em out of here; I want to get ’em out.” The White House has set a goal of 1 million removals a year, but according to the latest government data, ICE is on track to carry out about 400,000 during Trump’s first year back in office. (U.S. border authorities also turned away about 100,000 people, which DHS counts in its overall deportation tally of more than 500,000.) It’s the highest level in a decade, though far short of the president’s promises.

Authoritative data on border arrests, deportations, and other immigration-enforcement metrics used to be published monthly by DHS’s Office of Homeland Security Statistics. But the office hasn’t released a report since January, and the deportation statistics cited by the administration typically appear in social-media posts and press releases.

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and her aides have tried to boost deportation numbers by setting arrest quotas for ICE officers. They have embraced and promoted imagery of harsh street-level immigration enforcement to sow fear and intimidate people into leaving. They present self-deportation as a more humane alternative to ICE enforcement, one that allows people to exit on their own terms rather than in shackles. Within weeks of Trump’s inauguration, Noem’s team began awarding contracts on an emergency basis for the promotional campaign, bypassing the standard competitive-bidding process.

Four senators, including Gary Peters, the ranking Democrat on the Senate homeland-security committee, sent a letter on November 20 to the DHS inspector general requesting an investigation into ties between top department officials and the GOP-linked firms that won the awards. Last month, ProPublica reported that one subcontractor is the Strategy Group, a company run by the husband of McLaughlin, the DHS spokesperson. The company has worked extensively for Noem and Corey Lewandowski, the longtime Trump lieutenant who has no formal role at DHS but functions as Noem’s de facto chief of staff.

“By invoking a national emergency, DHS was able to award this contract while circumventing federal contracting regulations requiring a fair and open competition, raising concerns that the Department misused emergency authorities to steer taxpayer funds toward politically connected entities,” the senators wrote in their letter.

DHS officials have denied wrongdoing. When ProPublica asked McLaughlin about her husband’s firm’s contract with DHS, McLaughlin said, “We don’t have visibility into why they were chosen.” She declined to comment to me on the ProPublica findings.

The self-deportation ads continue to appear on social-media platforms and during Spanish-language broadcasts of soccer games and other sporting events. One recent ad, shared by DHS and the White House to Instagram, shows images of ICE officers shackling migrants and loading them onto planes alongside the words “If ICE finds you.” Then it pivots to the words “If you self-deport” and a set of images showing smiling travelers and kids getting stuffed animals as they board a flight home.

Although DHS’s spending on ads has been a boon to contractors, the campaign doesn’t appear to be persuading many people to use CBP Home. By the department’s own estimates, only about one in every 50 immigrants who has self-deported since Trump took office has done so using the app. Most of them are giving up and leaving quietly, without the money or the free flight.

Noem and other department leaders insist that they have not missed the White House’s deportation target and are in fact exceeding it. They claim that 1.6 million immigrants have voluntarily left the country since Trump took office—four times the number removed by ICE. If true, it would be the largest drop in the number of foreign-born U.S. residents on record, with potential implications for food prices, rents, wages, and other benchmark indicators.

Trump officials have already declared victory. Micah Bock, a DHS public-affairs official who records weekly social-media videos that sermonize on U.S. history and culture (including that “America is not a nation of immigrants” and that “Thanksgiving is not a global potluck”), claimed this month that mass departures will benefit Americans worried about affordability.

“Wages for Americans are rising,” Bock said in one video. “Rents in places like the Midwest, Miami, and Boston are plummeting as foreign nationals leave our country in droves.”

Bock’s Thanksgiving message claimed that DHS has “driven the largest decline in the foreign-born population of the United States in over 50 years” and that the drop is “making our neighborhoods safer for children to play outside and our elders to walk without fear.”

The 1.6 million figure appears to be based on an estimate by the Center for Immigration Studies, a small Washington, D.C.–based think tank whose efforts to restrict immigration have had an outsize influence on Trump’s policy advisers, including Stephen Miller. DHS has treated the demographic estimates as an enforcement statistic, reporting the departures as if they were carried out by ICE officers rather than estimated by academic analysts.

DHS officials declined to explain to me the basis for the claim of 1.6 million self-deportations. The department has previously suggested that the figure is a product of its own data, without saying how it was reached. So I called Steven Camarota, one of the researchers at the Center for Immigration Studies who came up with the estimate.

Camarota and the other analysts I spoke with cautioned that the available data are preliminary and that more estimates will be released by the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey next year.

Camarota and a co-author used data from the monthly Current Population Survey, a Census Bureau query of 60,000 households that is used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to calculate the unemployment rate and other monthly indicators. The CPS estimated a 2.2 million decline in the country’s foreign-born population from January to July.

Camarota calculated that three-quarters of that change was the result of self-deportations by immigrants Trump compelled to leave. “These declines are unprecedented, and so they should be viewed with some skepticism,” Camarota told me. “But the best data we have shows a big decline. We’re seeing it month after month.” He also pointed to surveys of employers in construction and hospitality—two industries that typically hire immigrants not authorized to work in the United States—that show employees quitting at increasing rates.