ICE Offers Up to $280 Million to Immigrant-Tracking ‘Bounty Hunter’ Firms

Immigration and Customs Enforcement is expanding plans to outsource migrant tracking to backstage surveillance firms, scrapping a caller $180 cardinal aviator connection successful favour of a no-cap programme with multimillion-dollar guarantees, according to caller contracting records reviewed by WIRED.

Late past month, the Intercept reported that ICE intends to prosecute bounty hunters and backstage investigators for street-level verification work. Contractors would corroborate location and enactment addresses for radical targeted for removal by—among different techniques—photographing residences, documenting comings and goings, and staking retired workplaces and flat complexes.

Those filings formed the inaugural arsenic a important but constricted aviator program. Contractors were guaranteed arsenic small arsenic $250 and could gain nary much than $90 cardinal each, with the wide programme capped astatine $180 million. That operation pointed to meaningful standard but inactive framed the effort arsenic a controlled trial, not an integral constituent of ICE’s removal operations.

Newly released amendments dismantle that structure. ICE has removed the program’s spending headdress and replaced it with dramatically higher per-vendor limits. Contractors whitethorn present gain up to $281.25 cardinal individually and are guaranteed an archetypal task bid worthy astatine slightest $7.5 million. The displacement signals to ICE’s contracting basal that this is nary longer an experiment, but an investment, and that the bureau expects prime-tier contractors to basal up the staffing, technology, and tract operations needed to relation arsenic a de facto limb of national enforcement.

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, did not instantly respond to WIRED's petition for comment.

The projected scope was already large. It described contractors receiving monthly recurring batches of 50,000 cases drawn from a docket of 1.5 cardinal people. Private investigators would corroborate individuals’ locations not lone done commercialized information brokers and open-source research, but via in-person visits erstwhile required. The filings outline a performance-based operation with bounty-like incentives: Firms volition beryllium paid a fixed terms per case, positive bonuses for velocity and accuracy, with vendors expected to suggest their ain inducement rates.

The declaration besides authorizes the Department of Justice and different DHS components to contented their ain orders nether the program.

Previous filings hinted that backstage investigators mightiness person entree to ICE’s interior case-management systems—databases that incorporate photos, biographical details, migration histories, and different enforcement notes. The amended filings reverse that, stating that contractors volition not beryllium permitted wrong bureau systems nether immoderate circumstance. Instead, DHS volition nonstop contractors exported lawsuit packets containing a scope of idiosyncratic information connected each target. This alteration limits nonstop vulnerability to national systems, but inactive places ample volumes of delicate accusation successful the hands of backstage surveillance firms operating extracurricular nationalist oversight.