The Trump administration’s plan to pay private citizens to aid its mass-surveillance program supposedly meant to target immigrants was met with pushback this week.
Last month, The Intercept was first to report on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement soliciting “skip tracers” — an umbrella term for people, like bounty hunters, who track down fugitives and targets — to participate in a paid program that will reward them for assisting in the administration’s immigration crackdown. And, considering the fact that this immigration crackdown has already swept up numerous U.S. citizens, one wonders whether and how citizens might find themselves in government-paid bounty hunters’ crosshairs under this program, as well.
Per The Intercept:
According to the document, which solicits information from interested contractors for a potentially forthcoming contract opportunity, companies hired by ICE will be given bundles of information on 10,000 immigrants at a time to locate, with further assignments provided in ‘increments of 10,000 up to 1,000,000.’ The solicitation says ICE is ‘exploring an incentive based pricing structure’ to encourage quick results, with ‘monetary bonuses’ paid out based on performance. For example, ICE says contractors might get paid a bonus for identifying a person’s correct address on the first try or finding 90 percent of its targets within a set timeframe.
On Thursday, the Independent published documents from the Department of Homeland Security showing the department could spend up to $180 million on this immigrant bounty program:
ICE could spend as much as $180 million to hire private investigators for physical surveillance operations at more than 1 million homes, what 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 include a person’s utility bills and other records, documents say.
As The Intercept reported, 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 an 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.
The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to MSNBC’s request for comment.
The representative’s letter goes on to refer to the “numerous instances of apparent racial profiling and discriminatory enforcement in our communities” that are helping fuel concerns about this bounty program. Earlier this year, conservatives on the Supreme Court essentially gave the Trump administration the green light to use racial profiling in its bigoted anti-immigrant crackdown.
It’s worth noting that such a program — in which the government pays private citizens to aid its efforts to target largely nonwhite people — is not without precedent in the United States. Academics like MSNBC’s Chris Hayes and others have written about modern-day policing tactics being rooted in oppressive policies imposed during and since the United States’ founding. And rewards programs for helping round up nonwhite people are a prime example.
In an essay for the Urban History Association’s blog The Metropole called “Anti-Black Punitive Traditions in Early American Policing,” historian DeAnza Cook described the Deep South’s “extensive slave patrol network, supplemented by slave-holding families, plantation overseers, and state militia reinforcements, in addition to privately hired, slave-catching, bounty hunters.”
The Trump administration has previously leaned into slavery-era nostalgia with its anti-immigrant agenda, such as when Kristi Noem touted the “legendary” history of a brutal former slave plantation currently being used to incarcerate immigrants in Louisiana. The immigrant bounty program is apparently another relic the Trump administration is looking to revive from that era.