Trump administration filed a federal lawsuit against an undocumented woman, accusing her of willfully failing to leave the United States after a removal order and seeking nearly $1 million in civil penalties under a 1996 law.

The case adds to a new wave of litigation that uses civil fines to pressure people with final removal orders to leave, as the administration revives and expands a tool that went largely unused for years. Public reporting on the defendant is thin and the available accounts do not identify her name, age, location, or the underlying circumstances of her removal case, leaving unclear how the government will try to prove the failure to depart was “willful.”

Congress enacted the 1996 law and President Bill Clinton signed it that year, creating authority for civil fines against people who “willfully” fail to depart after they are ordered removed. The provision’s focus on willfulness has long made it harder to apply in practice, because the government must argue the person intentionally refused to comply rather than missing a deadline for other reasons.

For roughly two decades, the provision went unimplemented even as immigration enforcement expanded in other areas, and that history matters now because the administration is leaning on a statutory tool that had not been regularly used to impose large penalties on people who lack legal status. During President Trump’s first term, Immigration and Customs Enforcement assessed 20 fines totaling almost $84,000 and collected only $4,215, a record that the Biden administration later cited when it moved away from the approach.

Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas halted the practice under Former President Biden, finding no evidence that it prompted departures, the reporting said, and that decision set the stage for a sharp policy reversal after Trump returned to office. Trump revived the fines through an executive order signed on his first day of the second term in January 2025, directing officials to resume financial penalties, and the administration then moved quickly to scale the program.

By June 2025, nearly 10,000 fines were issued, followed by regulations designed to allow faster and larger-scale assessments. By August 2025, fines reached 21,500, totaling over $6 billion.

Tricia McLaughlin, a DHS spokesperson, framed the renewed effort as a bid to increase compliance with immigration enforcement, tying the effort to administration leadership and goals. The statement positioned the fines as part of enforcing removal orders and improving the government’s effectiveness in applying immigration laws.

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

The lawsuit against the woman stands out because it seeks to convert an administrative penalty approach into a court fight, with the government asking a judge to impose a large civil judgment for alleged noncompliance with a removal order. The administration has presented the wider push as a response to removal-order noncompliance by undocumented immigrants, using financial penalties as leverage when detention and deportation do not happen quickly.

Officials and advocates have pointed to several ways the government can try to pursue and collect penalties, including civil lawsuits, wage garnishment, asset seizure, the use of private debt collectors, and requiring payment if a person ever returns to the United States in the future. Immigrant advocates argue those tools carry sharp due-process risks and can hit low-income people hardest, and they have disputed whether the government can fairly treat a person’s failure to depart as “willful” without a more searching look at individual circumstances.

Moore, described as an expert in the reporting but not further identified, criticized how the administration is applying the 1996 law and argued the approach undermines rights and intends to intimidate. Moore said the fines were being applied in a manner inconsistent with the law’s original purpose and that the policy aimed to scare people into leaving rather than just collect penalties.

“They’re using the law in a way that it was never intended to apply. 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,”

That critique connects to a broader legal fight already underway, including a class-action lawsuit filed in November 2025 in federal court in Boston that challenges the mechanism as illegal and signals that courts may have to decide how far the government can go in assessing and enforcing large civil fines tied to non-departure. The enforcement wave has unfolded alongside a separate set of initiatives the administration describes as encouraging people to self-deport.

One element involves a CBP app-based self-departure initiative that offers a stipend, pairing a financial incentive with the threat of escalating penalties for those who remain after a removal order. Secretary Kristi Noem announced a higher stipend on January 28, 2026, raising it from $1,000 to $2,600, and linked the incentive to an ultimatum about enforcement.

“Illegal aliens should take advantage of this gift and self-deport because if they don’t, we will find them, we will arrest them, and they will never return,”

The administration’s approach combines that incentive with the revived fines program, creating a carrot-and-stick strategy that officials portray as both an off-ramp and a warning. In that framework, the CBP stipend offers one path out, while the fines effort threatens long-term financial consequences for people who do not leave.

The government has also promoted the strategy by pointing to claimed results, saying there have been 2.2 million self-deportations since January 2025, a figure the Brookings Institution disputes. The disagreement highlights a basic measurement problem because “self-deport” can describe different outcomes depending on how departures are tracked and categorized, and analysts have challenged how officials interpret the available data.

The competing claims complicate efforts to connect the fines campaign and the stipend messaging to any single measure of compliance, and the lawsuit against the woman illustrates a different uncertainty. With so few publicly reported facts about her identity or the background of her removal case, it is difficult to assess how representative her situation is of the broader population of people with final orders of removal or how the government will attempt to show intentional noncompliance in court.

Even so, the administration’s broader narrative has been consistent: removal orders must carry consequences, and financial penalties can help force compliance. McLaughlin’s statement placed the fines in that context, tying them directly to Trump and Noem and to what she described as enforcing “the American people’s immigration laws.”

The legal tool behind the effort is not new, but the scale and speed described in the recent ramp-up mark a shift in how the government is using it, and the long period of limited or sporadic use has become part of today’s dispute. Advocates argue the penalties were not designed to operate as a mass compliance lever against undocumented immigrants, and the administration’s willingness to pursue collection mechanisms such as wage garnishment and asset seizure has fueled those objections.

The government, in contrast, has argued that consequences matter because the law does not enforce itself, and it has presented the fines as part of a larger drive to make immigration enforcement more effective. Two court tracks now run alongside each other: government litigation seeking civil penalties from individuals who do not depart, and private litigation challenging the legality of the mechanism itself.

The Boston class action filed in November 2025 underscores the stakes for the government’s broader rollout because an adverse ruling could limit how the fines program works, even as officials continue to promote compliance through both penalties and incentives. The lawsuit against the woman also puts attention back on the practical meaning of “willful” in this context, since the administration’s case hinges on treating failure to depart after a final order as intentional noncompliance.

For now, the administration has made clear it intends to use the full range of enforcement tools it has highlighted, from civil lawsuits and collection measures to a self-deport stipend promoted as a “gift” with a warning attached. With fines climbing into the tens of thousands and a class action challenging the mechanism, the next flashpoints will come from the courts and from how aggressively the government seeks to collect the penalties it assesses.