Donald Trump is unhappy with the pace of deportations, which remain below his target of one million per year, so the administration is looking for ways to accelerate them. The latest proposal is a plan to hire bounty hunters to locate undocumented migrants, who could then be added to the deportation list.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is seeking private companies to find individuals targeted by the agency in exchange for payment, according to a document obtained by The Intercept. The agency says it is “exploring” the possibility of hiring bounty hunters and asks interested parties to submit proposals.
“It is very dangerous,” warned Latoya Macbean Pompy, a New York immigration attorney with a YouTube channel. “This proposal would allow contractors to earn monetary bonuses based on how many immigrants they locate, turning human lives into numbers and incentivizing overreach, wrongful targeting and civil rights violations. […] [It] could certainly include U.S. citizens, green card holders and documented and undocumented immigrants.”
According to the document, companies contracted by ICE would be provided with information packages on 10,000 immigrants at a time for location purposes, increasing in increments of 10,000 until reaching one million. The bounty hunters’ task would be to verify that the addresses provided by ICE — home or work — are correct.
“The vendor should prioritize the alien’s residence, but failing that will attempt to verify place of employment,” the document states.
If the information ICE has on file is incorrect, the contracted company must “provide new location data to the government that can allow the government to easily locate the individual.” This data could include addresses, phone numbers, place of employment, information about vehicles, property, and social media.
Additionally, contractors must provide ICE with photos and documents that verify the information submitted. The agency can either close the case or request that the contractors deliver documents to the migrants under investigation, which must be done in person with a signed receipt. Any adult residing at the address can receive the documents.
For surveillance and verification, the agency encourages bounty hunters to use all technological systems available on the market, including “enhanced location research, which entails automated and manual real-time skip tracing.” ICE already uses software programs to track the phones of targeted migrants.
ICE plans to offer incentives, including monetary bonuses based on performance, to encourage fast results. For example, contractors could receive a bonus for identifying the correct address on the first attempt or for locating 90% of their targets within a set timeframe.
Pressure to increase deportations
The immigration agency made its urgency clear in the leaked document: “ICE has an immediate need for skip tracing and process serving services,” the request states. Interested parties were required to submit their proposals by November 6. ICE has not responded to EL PAÍS’s request for information on how many companies submitted bids.
The government has reported that around 400,000 people have been deported this year and plans to end the fiscal year with 600,000 expulsions (although these numbers also include people denied entry at the border). This figure is still below the one-million target, set as the goal for achieving the largest deportation effort in history, a top priority for President Trump.
The way ICE agents have carried out arrests has led many detainees to claim that bounty hunters apprehended them, even when that was not the case. Immigration officials arrive at raid sites in unmarked vehicles, approach migrants with their faces covered, without uniforms, and do not present any identification.
“They say they’re ICE agents, but we’re not sure. When we ask for their credentials, they don’t show them to us,” Rocío Treminio-López, mayor of Brentwood, Maryland, told EL PAÍS in a recent interview. In her view, the lack of training and professionalism among those claiming to be federal agents, evident in videos of arrests, shows that they are not working for ICE. Additionally, the vehicles used bear license plates from other states, such as Florida
Treminio-López’s municipality has been heavily affected by raids, and the Democratic mayor has called on the Maryland Assembly to regulate bounty-hunting activity. She complains that masked individuals detaining Latinos in her community rely on racial profiling, and recounts the case of a young U.S. citizen whom the unidentified agents tried to take into custody, and only avoided capture thanks to the opposition of local residents.
Authorities, however, have denied that there has been any collaboration between ICE and bounty hunters, at least so far.
Chuck Jordan, president of the International Bounty Hunter Union, an organization linked to the National Association of Fugitive Recovery Agents, acknowledged in a phone conversation that the lack of identification by agents causes confusion but denied that they are bounty hunters.
“Bond and fugitive recovery agents have been arresting undocumented immigrants for decades, but it’s done within the framework of the bail bond industry,” he said. “We can arrest migrants who have fled after posting bail and return them to custody, if the company that paid the bail hires us. But we can’t go out and randomly search for undocumented immigrants, like ICE does. That’s not legally permitted.”
The type of contracts ICE is preparing would expand its role, but Jordan insists that detention is not part of it: “Any reward ICE might be paying would be solely for information that anyone could provide. They are not asking bounty hunters to detain undocumented immigrants or paying for that service,” he said.
The idea of having people outside ICE go out into the streets in search of migrants to detain, however, is not new. This year, at least three states considered legislative proposals to incentivize migrant hunting. Legislators in Missouri and Mississippi rejected a Republican initiative to pay $1,000 to citizens for each undocumented immigrant they captured. Arizona also had a proposal on the table to pay $2,500 to police for each migrant detained and subsequently deported.
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