ICE Is Planning to Build a Bounty Hunter Army

Led by Erik Prince, Donald Trump ally and founder of the notorious mercenary firm Blackwater, the group proposed (among other ideas) that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) create a “skip tracing team” that would send out private contractors to hunt down immigrants targeted for deportation, per reporting at the time by Politico.

Now, there are indications ICE is carrying out those plans.

Last month, the Lever revealed that ICE had signed a $7 million contract with defense contractor SOS International for “skip tracing services.” SOS International, also known as SOSi, has long done business with the federal government, including working with the US military in Afghanistan — and has business ties to one of the military contractors whose name was listed alongside Prince’s in the proposal.

It was the first time, per online federal procurement databases, that an ICE contract description contained the phrase “skip tracing,” a term usually associated with debt collection and bounty hunting. There was little further detail about the services SOSi would provide to Trump’s immigration enforcers.

The contract — with its eerie callback to the Prince deportation blueprint — appears not to be a fluke. Several days later, ICE signed another “skip tracing” contract, this time worth up to $33.5 million, with international debt collector Global Recovery Group LLC.

Then, on Friday, October 31, as the Intercept first reported, ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations bureau, the agency’s primary deportation arm, released procurement documents that mapped out new plans to create a bounty-hunting program that would deploy skip tracing methods. Though the documents are preliminary, ICE’s proposed program hews closely to the blueprint drawn up in February by Prince and his cadre of military contractors.

Under the program, private contractors will deploy “all technology systems available” to locate ICE’s targets, the documents say. Contractors would be given a list of ten thousand names at a time and be allowed to ultimately locate “up to 1,000,000” individuals, per the records.

ICE already has plenty of technology at its disposal to identify and track down immigrants, an arsenal that the agency is further building out now that it is flush with cash. But the “skip tracing team” appears distinct in that its mandate would include sending out privately contracted bounty hunters to systematically identify immigrants’ residences and workplaces.

The bounty hunting program would include “performance-based incentives” — cash bonuses for vendors who successfully hunt down immigrants for ICE. This cash payout idea appears to be pulled directly from the Prince memo, which suggested that ICE build out a “bounty program which provides a cash reward for each illegal alien held by a state or local law enforcement officer.”

To judge from ICE’s first skip tracing contracts with SOSi and Global Recovery Group LLC, which are together worth over $40 million, the program will prove yet another gold mine for the military contractors clamoring for their cut of the Trump administration’s multibillion-dollar immigration spending blitz. And that makes sense: it was drafted by those same vendors.