By Karoun Demirjian, CQ Staff

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials are scrapping a pilot program intended to encourage illegal immigrants to enable their own deportations after only a handful of people signed up, vindicating skeptics who derided the program.

The program, called “Scheduled Departure,” was geared toward illegal immigrants who have received final notices of deportation from the immigration courts and have no other criminal history — approximately 457,000 people — and offered a trade-off: immigrants who came forward and agreed to be deported within 90 days of reporting to an ICE agent would be assured that they would not be forcibly deported in a raid.

After three weeks, eight people turned up to take advantage of the offer: an Indian couple and a Guatemalan in Chicago, Ill.; a Mexican man in San Diego, Calif.; an Estonian in Phoenix, Ariz.; an El Salvadorian in Charlotte, N.C.; and two Lebanese and a Guatemalan immigrants from Santa Ana, Calif., according to ICE tabulations. None have yet left the country.

Immigration advocates, who labeled the program everything from “a non-idea” to “a joke” when it was proposed, did not temper their views this week. But many also expressed fear that ICE’s efforts to promote a softer, friendlier image through the voluntary deportation program was a publicity stunt to give the agency an excuse to justify tougher tactics.

“ICE knows their offer was laughable,” said Jorge Mario Cabrera, a director with the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights in Los Angeles. “They knew that their effort to arrest, detain, deport families, and tear families apart was causing them a media nightmare, a P.R. nightmare. . . . I am worried that they would utilize this failed attempt of having people turn themselves in to say now they have the duty to go after every one of these folks.”

Jim Hayes, acting director of the Office of Detention and Removal Programs, refused to peg the pilot project as a failure but said “the most effective way to restore integrity to the immigration system is to do it through the way we traditionally operate in fugitive operations, at residences, and in places of business.”

“This wasn’t something we had very high hopes for in terms of it being the answer to fugitive operations,” Hayes said.

As a point of comparison, he said ICE fugitive operations teams made 1,300 arrests of illegal immigrants nationwide, including 750 who would have been eligible for scheduled deportation, during the three weeks that the pilot program was in operation.

But the methods of ICE’s fugitive operations teams have drawn congressional scrutiny in recent months. Some lawmakers have questioned ICE’s tactics, and point to this spring’s raid on a meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa, as an example of excess.

While immigrant advocates have called for a moratorium on enforcement actions, they say that ICE’s offer to avoid such operations with those who took advantage of the scheduled departure program are not enough of an incentive to bring forward illegal immigrants who, once deported, are barred from re-entry for 10 years.

“ICE’s self-deport program failed because most of these workers are desperately clinging to the hope that they can stay in the United States and continue to support their loved ones,” said Joshua Hoyt, executive director of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights.

ICE officials have said the low turnout was partly the fault of immigration advocates’ lack of willingness to cooperate with advertising and promoting the program. Hayes said Friday that ICE would continue seeking options for compromise with immigrant advocates, but maintained that the agency would “continue to do the job Congress has mandated us to do” by stepping up raids and detentions.

Despite the promise of continued raids, some are finding a silver lining in lessons learned: advocates for illegals say the pilot program defanged one argument against legalizing the status of the estimated 12 million people in the country illegally — that they are criminals and should not be afforded any legal amnesty.