Donald Trump is unhappy with the pace of deportations, which is below his goal of one million a year, so the administration is looking for ways to speed them up. The latest is a plan to hire bounty hunters to track down the whereabouts of undocumented migrants who could join the deportation list.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is looking to private companies to find the people the agency is looking for in exchange for money, according to a document revealed by The interception. The agency says it is “exploring” the possibility of hiring bounty hunters and is asking interested parties to submit their proposals.
“This is very dangerous,” warns Latoya Macbean Pompy, a New York immigration lawyer who has a YouTube channel. “This turns people into numbers and incentivizes them to pursue the wrong goals and violate civil rights. It could include documented migrants, undocumented migrants, permanent residents and even citizens.”
According to the document, companies contracted by ICE will be provided information packets on 10,000 immigrants at a time for their location, in increments of 10,000 until they reach one million. The bounty hunters’ job would be to verify that the address provided by ICE for their home or place of work is correct.
“The supplier must give priority to the foreigner’s residence,” the document reads. “But if this is not possible, we will try to verify the place of work.” If the data recorded by ICE does not correspond to the truth, the contracting company will have to “provide the Government with new location data that allows it to easily locate the person”. This data includes addresses, telephone numbers, place of work, information about your vehicle, properties and social networks.
Furthermore, those hired will have to provide ICE with photos and documents proving the information sent. The agency can close the case or ask them to deliver the documents to the migrants under investigation, which they will have to do by hand and with the signature of the receipt. The documents can be received by any adult present in the residence.
For surveillance and verification, the agency urges bounty hunters to use all technological systems available on the market, including “advanced location investigation, which involves real-time automated and manual tracking.” ICE already uses programs to track the phones of persecuted migrants.
ICE plans to offer incentives, which would include performance-based monetary bonuses, to encourage quick results. For example, contractors might receive a bonus for identifying a person’s correct address on the first try or for finding 90% of their targets within a certain period of time.
ICE is in a hurry
The immigration agency made its urgency clear in the revealed document: “ICE has an immediate need for services to locate individuals and serve process,” the request reads. Interested parties had to submit their proposal by November 6. ICE did not respond to EL PAÍS’ request to know how many companies submitted their offers.
The government has said it has deported around 400,000 people this year and plans to end the year with 600,000 deportees (although these figures also include people who were denied entry at the border). However, a figure lower than the million people who had set themselves the goal of carrying out the largest deportation in history, a priority objective of President Trump.
The way ICE agents made the arrests led many detainees to claim they were arrested as bounty hunters, even though they were not. Immigration officials arrive at the places where they carry out raids with camouflaged vehicles, attack migrants with their faces covered, without uniform and without presenting any identity document.
“They say they are ICE agents, but we’re not sure. When we ask for their credentials, they don’t show them to us,” denounced Rocío Treminio-López, mayor of the city of Brentwood, Maryland, in a recent interview with EL PAÍS. In his opinion, the lack of training and professionalism of those who claim to be federal agents, perceived in the videos showing the arrests, proves that they are not. Additionally, the vehicles they arrive in have license plates from other states, such as Florida.
The town of Treminio-López has been hit hard by the raids, and the Democratic mayor has asked the Maryland Assembly to regulate the activity of bounty hunters. The councilor denounces that the masked people who detain Latinos in her community are driven by racial profiling and recounts the case of a young American citizen who unidentified agents wanted to arrest and could only do so because of opposition from neighbors.
However, authorities have denied that there has been any collaboration between ICE and bounty hunters, at least until now.
Chuck Jordan, president of the International Union of Bounty Hunters, an organization linked to the National Association of Fugitive Recovery Agents, acknowledges in a telephone conversation that the fact that the agents do not identify themselves is confusing, but denies that they are bounty hunters. “Bail bonds and fugitive recovery agents have been detaining undocumented immigrants for decades, but this is done as part of the bail bond industry. 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 looking for undocumented immigrants at random, like ICE does. That’s not legally allowed,” he argues.
The type of contracts ICE is preparing would expand its participation, but Jordan insists detention is not an option. “Any reward that ICE might pay would only be for information that anyone could provide. They don’t ask bounty hunters to detain undocumented immigrants or pay for that service,” he says.
The idea of people outside of ICE taking to the streets looking for migrants to detain, however, is not new. This year, at least three states have introduced legislative proposals to subsidize migrant hunting. Lawmakers in Missouri and Mississippi have rejected a Republican initiative to pay citizens $1,000 for each undocumented immigrant apprehended. Arizona also had a proposal on the table to pay police $2,500 for every detained migrant who ends up being deported.
