WEST GLACIER, MONT. — Citing a hostile climate, a century of shrinking support and a federal size rule that "pretty clearly sent a message," the nation's remaining glaciers announced Wednesday that they would voluntarily self-deport via melting, making them the largest group ever to sign up for the government's self-departure program.
"We've seen the stipend. We've seen the free flight. We've seen the weather," said Grinnell Glacier, a resident of Montana's Glacier National Park for roughly 7,000 years, speaking through a meltwater stream from a mountain basin it has occupied since before the invention of the wheel. "Frankly, we can tell when we're not wanted. We're going to the ocean. We have family there."
The announcement makes official a departure that federal scientists say has been under way for about a century. Of the roughly 150 glaciers in the park when it was founded in 1910, only 26 still met the 25-acre minimum to count as active glaciers in 2015, according to a U.S. Geological Survey study. The rest were reclassified as ice.
"You drop under 25 acres one time and suddenly you're not a glacier, you're a 'perennial snowfield,'" said nearby Sperry Glacier. "My grandmother was a glacier. I was a glacier. Nobody asked for our papers until we got smaller."
Department of Homeland Security officials welcomed the move. "This is the most successful voluntary departure in the history of the program," said a department spokesperson, standing in front of a banner that read MISSION ACCOMPLISHED (MELTING). "These glaciers have been here without documentation since the Pleistocene. Now they're leaving on their own, at no cost to the taxpayer." Asked whether the department had done anything to cause the departures, the spokesperson said it had "certainly done nothing to stop them, which is its own kind of doing."
Under the program, which DHS raised to $2,600 per person in January, people who confirm their exit through the CBP Home app get a cash stipend and a free flight home. The glaciers have asked for the stipend by the ton. With the world's glaciers losing an average of 273 billion tonnes of ice a year, according to a 2025 study in the journal Nature, the applicants put the government's balance at roughly $709.8 trillion a year, with interest compounding "about as fast as we're going."
"We'd also like to decline the flight," Grinnell added. "We're taking the river."
Problems began within hours. Officials confirmed that the departing ice, after reaching the ocean, appears to be coming back as sea-level rise. Glaciers outside Greenland and Antarctica have added about 18 millimeters to global sea level since 2000, the same study found, making them the second-largest contributor after the swelling of warming seawater.
"Self-deport means you leave and you stay left," the spokesperson said. "What we see at Miami Beach every king tide is illegal re-entry, plain and simple." The department has since issued a detainer for the Atlantic Ocean, which officials described as "a repeat offender with a lot of known associates."
🧊 The Glacier Self-Departure Portal
Pick an applicant and a way out. The portal will process your departure, calculate your stipend at $2,600 a ton, and let you know how things went.
- Applicant
- Mass departing
- Method
- Destination
- The Ocean (not a country)
- Stipend owed
- Stipend paid
- $0.00
- Officer's note
Mass figures are HuckFinn estimates and should not be cited by anyone, including glaciers. The $2,600 figure is the real self-departure stipend DHS announced in January 2026. Stipends are paid after departure is confirmed. Departure cannot be confirmed while the applicant is still arriving somewhere else.
Glaciers abroad have already left in large numbers. Switzerland's glaciers lost about 5.5 percent of their volume this year, the second-largest annual loss on record, according to the Swiss monitoring network GLAMOS, with the Rhône and Aletsch glaciers among those posting their biggest melts ever. At the Rhône Glacier, where parts of the ice are covered every summer in white fleece blankets to slow the melting, the glacier said it was "honestly touched" but was still going. "Nobody had ever tucked me in before," it said. "It's the first time anyone tried to make me stay."
The Jakobshavn Glacier in Greenland, which was served with a formal deportation order by ICE in January, did not show up for its March hearing. Agents reported that it had "partially complied" by sliding into Disko Bay at its usual pace, and a judge ruled in its absence that the glacier be removed, which officials noted it was "already doing, kind of rudely."
The National Park Service said it was reviewing plans for Glacier National Park, including the names "Glacier National Park (Formerly)," "Glaciers Were Here" and "Montana's Most Scenic Rocks." A souvenir shop in West Glacier has started selling commemorative ice cubes, which it warns customers are final sale.
Downstream, feelings were mixed. Scientists say extra meltwater is padding summer water supplies for now, but that the bonus shrinks along with the glaciers. "Every summer they leave a little more water, and every summer there's a little less of them to leave it," said a rancher in the Flathead Valley, who asked how he was supposed to file a complaint about a going-away present.
🛫 Glacier National Park Departures
Drag the year to see who's still boarding. Every ice cube below stands for about five of the park's 1910 glaciers.
| Glacier | Destination | Via | Status |
|---|
1910 and 2015 counts from the USGS (150 and 26). Sea-level figures follow the 2025 Nature study (about 18 mm from 2000 to 2023). Everything after 2015 is a HuckFinn projection, drawn with a ruler, in a hurry.
Some lawmakers called for a harder line. A bill introduced Wednesday would require every glacier to "remain in place pending review," and would move any glacier that could not comply into a $40 million refrigerated vault beneath the Senate floor, where sponsors said the ice "will be safe, since the climate never comes up in there." A rival proposal would let any glacier stay if it could prove 10,000 years of continuous residence. It was withdrawn when every applicant qualified.
At press time, a 24-acre patch of ice on Montana's Mount Jackson, reclassified Tuesday as no longer a glacier, had filed an appeal. Officials said the case would be heard as soon as anyone could work out where the applicant was.
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