Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is allocating as much as $180 million to pay bounty hunters and private investigators who verify the address and location of undocumented people ICE wishes to detain, including with physical surveillance, according to procurement records reviewed by 404 Media.

The documents provide more details about ICE’s plan to enlist the private sector to find deportation targets. In October The Intercept reported on ICE’s intention to use bounty hunters or skip tracers—an industry that often works on insurance fraud or tries to find people who skipped bail. The new documents now put a clear dollar amount on the scheme to essentially use private investigators to find the locations of undocumented immigrants.

💡Do you know anything else about this plan? Are you a private investigator or skip tracer who plans to do this work? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.

“I am sure PIs, bounty hunters, process servers, and anyone with access to commercial databases can apply and will,” Igor Ostrovskiy, an experienced private investigator with Ostro Intelligence, and who expressed concerns with ICE’s plans, told 404 Media. “Money is money and people will jump at the opportunity to embed their business as a government contractor.”

The documents are part of a package published by ICE on Monday. They say ICE is seeking assistance with a “docket size” of 1.5 million, in which the agency will give vendors a batch of 50,000 last known addresses of aliens residing in the U.S. The bounty hunters are then to verify the people live at those addresses, or find their current location, and provide that information to ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO). ICE says bounty hunters are to start with online research such as Google or commercial data, before moving onto physical surveillance.

“To achieve a higher level of confidence, the vendor may physically verify the alien’s location and presence, preferably confirming their home or work location. The vendor will then report the physical location to the Government or inform the Government that it is not able to locate the alien, and any additional visits would be fruitless. The vendor should prioritize locating the home address and only resort to employment location, failing that,” one of the documents says.

As I’ve reported for years, bounty hunters, private investigators, and skip tracers all have access to powerful surveillance technology and tools. That ranges from automatic license plate reader (ALPR) databases that can easily reveal a car’s movements (and by extension, a person’s movements); the personal data related to someone’s credit report which can reveal their address; and location data harvested from smartphones. In 2019 I reported that bounty hunters were able to pay a few hundred dollars for the realtime location of someone’s phone, via location data T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T were selling. A private investigator source with access previously demoed the ALPR tracking tool to me and I bought the telecom location data myself.

The ICE document says the bounty hunters are expected to provide timestamped photos of the location they visit, a target’s utility bills or other proof of residence; employment verification records, and any other evidence.

In a second document, ICE says the minimum contract as part of this plan is $250, and the maximum ceiling for each is $90 million. The total combined funds is $180 million, according to the document.

Ostrovskiy said that the work laid out by ICE will likely be handled by medium to large size businesses based on the case load, potentially requiring more than a hundred field staff and dozens of call office workers. “So this is a move to outsource ICE enforcement partially to large government contractors,” he said. “My immediate reaction is that this is a huge surprise, never expected a federal law enforcement function to get outsourced to private industry. Especially such a controversial one.”

Valerie McGilvrey, a longtime skip tracer, told 404 Media “100% PI’s will take up ICE on this offer.”

“I know people who have been doing it. I would also do it,” she added.

Ostrovskiy was concerned what this ICE work might mean for other private investigators, even those who don’t work with the agency. “This work brings a huge risk. PIs mostly work to counter fraud and the idea that we can be mistaken for doing ICE operations will put us at risk in the field,” he said. “It would be very bad for my ability to operate and it will get dangerous once people realize that PIs could be the front line of ICE operations.”

On Monday, Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi sent a letter to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem saying “Allowing private contractors to perform enforcement activities under a system of performance-based financial incentives, essentially bounty hunting, outsources one of the government’s most coercive powers to actors who operate with little oversight and limited public accountability.”

ICE did not respond to a request for comment.

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