Donald Trump is unhappy with the pace of deportations, which remain below his goal of one million a year, so the administration is looking for ways to speed them up. The latest proposal is a plan to hire bounty hunters to locate undocumented migrants, who could then be added to the deportation list.
According to a document obtained by The interception. The agency says it is “exploring” the possibility of hiring bounty hunters and is asking interested parties to submit proposals.
“It’s very dangerous,” warned Latoya Macbean Pompy, a New York immigration lawyer with a YouTube channel. “This proposal would allow contractors to earn monetary bonuses based on the number of immigrants detected, turning lives into numbers and incentivizing overshooting, mistargeting, and civil rights violations. (…) (It) could certainly include US, green card holders, and documented and undocumented immigrants.”
According to the document, companies contracted by ICE would be provided information packets on 10,000 immigrants at a time for tracking purposes, increasing in increments of 10,000 until reaching one million. The bounty hunters’ job would be to verify that the addresses provided by ICE – home or work – are correct.
“The seller should give priority to the foreigner’s residence, but otherwise will attempt to verify the place of work,” the document states.
If the information ICE has on file is incorrect, the contracted company must “provide the government with new location data that can allow the government to easily locate the individual.” This data may include addresses, phone numbers, place of work, vehicle, property and social media information.
Additionally, contractors must provide ICE with photos and documents verifying the information submitted. The agency can close the case or ask contractors to deliver documents to the migrants under investigation, which must be done in person with a signed receipt. Any adult resident 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 “advanced location tracking, which details automatic and manual tracking of skips in real time.” ICE already uses software programs to track the phones of targeted migrants.
ICE plans to offer incentives, including performance-based monetary bonuses, to encourage rapid results. For example, contractors could receive a bonus for identifying the correct address on the first try or for locating 90% of their targets within a set time period.
Pressure to increase deportations
The immigration agency made its urgency clear in the leaked document: “ICE has an immediate need for skip tracing and service processing services,” the request reads. Interested parties had to submit their proposals by November 6. ICE did not respond to EL PAÍS’ request for information on how many companies submitted offers.
The government reported that about 400,000 people were deported this year and expects to end the fiscal year with 600,000 deportations (although these figures also include people who were denied entry at the border). This figure is still short of the one million goal set as a goal to achieve the largest deportation effort in history, a top priority for President Trump.
The way ICE agents made arrests led many detainees to claim that bounty hunters had captured them, even when that wasn’t the case. Immigration officials arrive at raid sites in unmarked vehicles, approach migrants with their faces covered, without uniforms and without presenting any identification documents.
“They say they are 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 his opinion, the lack of training and professionalism among those claiming to be federal agents, evident in the videos of the arrests, proves that they do not work for ICE. Additionally, the vehicles used carry license plates from other states, such as Florida
The municipality of Treminio-López has been heavily affected by the raids, and the Democratic mayor has asked the Maryland Assembly to regulate the bounty hunting activity. He complains that masked individuals detain Latinos in his community on the basis of racial profiling and recounts the case of a young US citizen who unidentified agents attempted to take into custody and managed to avoid capture only due to opposition from local residents.
Authorities, however, have denied that there has been, at least so far, any collaboration between ICE and bounty hunters.
Chuck Jordan, president of the International Bounty Hunter Union, an organization linked to the National Association of Fugitive Recovery Agents, acknowledged in a telephone conversation that the agents’ lack of identification causes confusion but denied that they are bounty hunters.
“Bail recovery and fugitive agents have been apprehending undocumented immigrants for decades, but this is done as part 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 posted bail hires us. But we can’t go out and randomly search for undocumented immigrants, like ICE does. That’s not legally allowed.”
The kind of contracts ICE is preparing would expand its role, but Jordan insists that detention is not part of it: “Any reward that ICE could pay would be solely for information that anyone could provide. They don’t ask bounty hunters to detain undocumented immigrants or pay for that service,” he said.
The idea of putting people outside of ICE on the streets looking for migrants to detain, however, is not new. This year, at least three states have considered legislative proposals to incentivize migrant hunting. Lawmakers in Missouri and Mississippi 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 migrant arrested and subsequently deported.
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