Wendy Elizabeth Ortiz Hernandez never expected the envelope in her mailbox to carry a debt she couldn’t pay in a thousand lifetimes.
Inside was a notice from U.S. immigration authorities: she owed the government $1.8 million.
Ortiz, 32, fled El Salvador years ago to escape an abusive ex and the gangs that made survival a daily gamble. She’s spent the last decade working long shifts at a Pennsylvania meatpacking plant for $13 an hour. She’s raising her autistic 6-year-old son, a U.S. citizen, in a rented apartment. Her life is built around rent payments, groceries, and therapy sessions. Not seven-digit fines.
Now, she’s one of 4,500 migrants hit with staggering penalties by the Trump administration — part of a sweeping revival of an obscure immigration enforcement tool, dusted off and weaponized just days after Trump returned to office. Notices went out, the math already done: daily fines of $998, retroactive for up to five years, maxing out at $1.8 million per person. The total owed across all recipients? Over half a billion dollars.
Ortiz’s reaction was blunt: “It’s not fair. Where is someone going to find that much money?”
Her fine is one of the highest known, but far from the only one. Immigration attorneys across the country are seeing clients blindsided with penalties ranging from thousands of dollars to the maximum $1.8 million. Some say they’re still unsure if the letters are real.
“They look fake,” said one New York-based attorney, whose client — a Mexican woman living in the U.S. for 25 years — also received the top-dollar penalty. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
The Trump administration is pushing these fines under the guise of “self-deportation,” targeting migrants who have previously been ordered removed but remained in the country. Whether they knew about the order or had a pending legal case doesn’t seem to matter. If you’re on the list, you owe.
The infrastructure for collecting this debt is hazy. ICE issued the fines, but Customs and Border Protection has been assigned the messy task of chasing the money — or the property — if it’s not paid. CBP is still trying to figure out how that’s even supposed to work.
Behind the legalese is a patchwork of human stories, like Rosa in New York, whose husband — a Honduran national — was fined $5,000. He had been granted voluntary departure in 2018 but couldn’t leave because Rosa was battling uterine cancer. The fine arrived anyway.
Ortiz, meanwhile, never got a notice for her immigration hearing in 2018. Without showing up to court, she was automatically ordered deported. This year, her attorney filed a humanitarian request asking that her case be reopened. Less than two weeks later, Trump was sworn in again. Then came the $1.8 million bill.
“This is a woman raising a special-needs child, with no criminal history. They have every detail of her background,” said her lawyer. “And still, they hit her with this? It’s insane.”
For Ortiz, the future is a fog. She’s seeking a 30-day extension to prepare a defense. But time is ticking, and the government is demanding either full payment or a sworn explanation backed by evidence — within a month.
There’s no telling how many others like her are quietly opening envelopes this week, wondering how a country they turned to for refuge has now turned around to demand a fortune.
