ICE Has Allocated 180 Million To Hire Bounty Hunters

ICE could spend as much as $180 million to hire private investigators for physical surveillance operations at more than 1 million homes, which the agency is calling “enhanced location research” that includes the “collection of photos and documents verifying the alien’s residence and/or place of employment.” Those documents could consist of a person’s utility bills and other records, according to these federal documents: 

"The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has an immediate need for Skip Tracing Services. Government furnished case data will be utilized with identifiable information, commercial data verification, and physical observation services, to verify alien address information, investigate alternative alien address information, and confirm the new location of aliens."

The documents, first reported by 404 Media, are among a wave of proposals outlining wider plans to expand immigration arrests and detention space under the Trump administration, which is jailing more than 66,000 people in immigration detention centers across the country, a record high.

The
administration has poured billions of dollars into immigration
enforcement to expand arrests in the country’s interior, with Congress
appropriating a record-setting sum that makes ICE one of the most
well-funded policing agencies in the world, rivaling some nations’
military spending.

Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, has aimed for hiring 10,000 ICE agents
by next year, or roughly doubling its footprint, with a major boost to
the agency’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division.

Critics
have warned that rapidly hiring agents and contractors — without
adequate screening — risks opening the door to repeat past mistakes,
after a surge in Customs and Border Patrol personnel under previous
administrations came with a spike in corruption and misconduct.

Illinois Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi sent a letter
to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem this week demanding answers about how the
program will be conducted and outlining some obvious concerns about
unleashing a seemingly unaccountable army of unofficial government
spies to snoop on others.

He wrote:

Once
the state begins contracting out its power to police, it invites the
very abuses, secrecy, and corruption our founders sought to prevent.
This danger is not hypothetical. Reports of individuals impersonating
immigration officers are rising, and DHS’s reliance on masked or
plainclothes agents has already blurred the public’s ability to
distinguish lawful authority from rogue activity.

Later in his letter, he writes:

When
the government pays private contractors based on how many people they
can find, detain, or deliver, it turns them into bounty hunters. In such
a system built on quotas and cash rewards with minimal oversight,
mistakes are not just possible — they are certain. The pressure to hit
numbers replaces the judgment, training, and accountability that should
define real law enforcement.

It’s worth remembering that this kind of program — in which the government compensates private citizens to help target largely nonwhite communities — has clear historical precedent in the United States. Scholars, including MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, have noted that many modern policing practices draw from punitive systems established at the nation’s founding and reinforced over centuries. Reward schemes aimed at capturing nonwhite people are among the most striking examples. 

Historian DeAnza Cook details this lineage in an essay for the Urban History Association’s The Metropole, “Anti-Black Punitive Traditions in Early American Policing.” She describes the Deep South’s vast slave-patrol apparatus, supported not only by plantation overseers and slave-holding families but also by state militias and privately hired slave-catching bounty hunters. 

The Trump administration has previously invoked this slavery-era legacy in its anti-immigrant policymaking — for example, when Kristi Noem praised the “legendary” history of a former slave plantation now used to detain immigrants in Louisiana. The proposed immigrant-bounty program appears to be yet another attempt to resurrect practices rooted in that era.