DHS fines woman $1.8M as she waits for pending immigration case

A Southern California woman says the Department of Homeland Security fined her more than $1.8 million, accumulating each day she’s been in the U.S. without legal status, despite her now 13-year effort to become a legal permanent resident.

The woman, who asked that NBC 7 not identify her out of fear for her safety, said she received a letter informing her of the fine in the mail on Friday.

“It was a shock,” she said. “When I started reading and I see the amount – $1,820,000 – it was kind of insane.”

She said she came to the U.S. from Mexico decades ago, when she was around 13 years old. She is undocumented and a judge issued her an order of voluntary departure – requiring her to leave the U.S. – in 2003. But she said she didn’t know about that order for a decade, until immigration agents came to find her in 2013, at which point she said she began the process to adjust her status.

“Since then I’ve been fighting my case,” she said. “I’ve been fighting for this too many years, to do the right thing.”

“No criminal record, no issues,” her immigration attorney William Menard said of her case. “She’s just been trying to get this fixed for a long time.”

Menard said the woman’s father and three adult children are all U.S. citizens and she’s in the process of applying for her green card, petitioning through her family.

“It takes time to get these things resolved,” Menard said. “The application that she’s currently applying for requires multiple waivers and each one of them takes multiple years for the government to process, like, they’re just pending for years at a time.”

In June, DHS announced an update to its policies, making it easier to fine people who have been ordered deported, and to increase the amount of the fine: up to $998 per day, for each day in the U.S. past that order.

“A pending green card application does not give someone legal status to be in our country,” a DHS spokesperson said in a statement Tuesday. “The Trump administration is not going to ignore the rule of law.”

Starting when President Donald Trump took office in January 2025 through mid-March of this year, DHS said ICE issued 65,101 of these fines totaling more than $36 billion.

“Our message is clear: Illegal aliens in the country illegally should leave now or face consequences,” the statement continued. “DHS is encouraging illegal aliens to voluntarily depart using the CBP Home app, which allows them to fly home for free and receive a $2,600 stipend, while preserving the option to return the legal, right way. Illegal aliens who do not depart will face fines of $1,000 per day, as well as arrest and deportation without return.”

Menard said his client’s original voluntary departure order from 2003 set a maximum fine at $5,000. DHS has since granted her permission to remain in the U.S. as her case makes its way through the backlogged immigration system, he added, noting that she has been checking in with ICE each year as she waits.  

“She’s not hiding. The government is fully aware of who she is and where she is and what she’s doing,” Menard said. “She’s been doing this for years, and they all of a sudden decided to issue the fine now.”

“I was like, ‘Why are they, you know, charging me this money if I haven’t done anything bad?’” she said, calling the letter “really, really scary.”

“I have three beautiful kids,” she said. “They’re all in university, they’re good kids, so I can’t be without them. I can’t imagine myself living in Mexico, I don’t even know Mexico. My life is here and I try to do the right things all the time.”

She works cleaning houses and said there was no way she would be able to afford the seven-figure penalty.

“They know that these people can’t pay close to $2 million in fines. It’s not going to happen,” Menard said.

Two women who received similar fines filed a class action lawsuit in Massachusetts in November, arguing the fines would drive them and thousands of other people “into ruinous debt,” asking a federal judge to rule them unconstitutional. There’s a hearing in that case scheduled for May 13.

“It seems to me it’s just another tactic by the Trump administration to make people’s lives miserable,” California’s U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla said, when asked about these cases. “You can imagine the horror when you get a notice of a potential fine like that, especially in this day and age when most working families are struggling to get by.”

“I do think it’s part of an intimidation factor to get people to just leave the country,” Menard said. “If they get scared and say, ‘Well, I can get arrested for not paying the fine,’ then they’ll choose to leave the country.”

“They want us to leave, but I don’t know why, when you’re trying to do the right way,” his client said. “Doing your taxes every year, work hard. That’s the only thing I’m doing here.”