The Trump administration is ratcheting up its deportation efforts with the hiring of human-tracking firms — a move critics call a “bounty hunter” program that is sure to increase the controversy surrounding immigration enforcement tactics. The federal government, offering up to $280 million, h as recently signed at least two contracts with private surveillance firms to hunt down immigrants at their homes and places of work, according to various reports. One of the companies, BI Incorporated, is a subsidiary of GEO Group, a for-profit prison company that currently does business with the government jailing detained immigrants, according to The Intercept. Trump administration proposals to use private tracking and investigative services have been circulating for months. Lawmakers in two states, Missouri and Mississippi, introduced legislation to create their own bounty hunter programs, but those bills stalled. The new federal contracts broaden the administration’s use of the private sector in immigration enforcement. For instance, BI Incorporated has had past government contracts in immigrant surveillance with ankle monitor-based tracking. The new contracts, one of which goes to a company called AI Solutions 87, mostly seek software and artificial intelligence investigative services, but the door is open for on-the-ground tracking. However, reporting by The Intercept and 404 Media suggests once the immigrant targets are pinpointed, federal agents would move in to detain and arrest them. In requesting bids, Immigration and Customs Enforcement said it was looking for private “Skip Tracing and Process Serving Services using Government furnished case data with identifiable information, commercial data verification and physical observation services . . .” In general, skip tracing is the process of tracking down people who are missing, unresponsive, or hard to find, according to Bosco Legal Services. Often, the practice is used to find individuals who have unpaid debts or failed to meet other obligations and may have “skipped” town. ICE considered “performance-based incentives” for the contractors, but the final proposal for request apparently did not include bonus language or specific per-head bounties, according to Snopes, nor did it include the term “bounty hunter.” But the contracts call for hunting down people for money. “Under ICE’s proposed system, vendors would be given 10,000 noncitizens to identify, verify, and/or serve with documents, with a potential to receive ‘further increments of 10,000 aliens,’” according to the Immigration Policy Tracking Project. Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., a senior member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, has been an outspoken critic of the private tracking program, which he said “would effectively establish a ‘bounty hunter’ model.” He sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem expressing “grave concern” about the initiative, according to his office. Krishnamoorthi warned the proposal would “outsource one of the government’s most coercive powers to actors who operate with little oversight and limited public accountability.” He wrote that such an arrangement “risks creating an enforcement apparatus that functions beyond the reach of ordinary checks and balances.” “When citizens can no longer discern who acts in the name of government, trust gives way to fear,” he added. “A government that rules through confusion and coercion rather than law and consent erodes its own legitimacy and the freedoms it exists to protect.” Some of the tactics of federal agents and officials have already come under fire at times as overly aggressive, lacking due process and failing to clarify who the enforcers work for. In some cases, U.S. citizens and immigrants with legal authority to be in the country have been jailed for days with little or no information as to why they were detained. The bills in Missouri and Mississippi appeared to be bonified bounty hunter proposals, with a $1,000 reward for assisting in the arrest of an undocumented immigrant. “I’m finding a tremendous amount of support. It’s actually gaining support across the country,” state Sen. David Gregory, a Republican from St. Louis, told Newsweek early this year. That didn’t happen. The two bills, which were similar, went nowhere. The legislation also had language that allowed law enforcement in the states to assist the federal government in enforcing immigration violations. Yet Gregory, the author of the Missouri bill, noted police departments are stretched thin. “The federal government, ICE, has been asking, in fact, begging for support from the state and local law enforcement officers across the entire country,” Gregory said. “So, part of this bill is the framework that requires that cooperation, number one.” “But number two, what we’re looking for is some sort of supplement, some sort of augmentation to the program, because a lot of major cities across the country are short on police. We’re already short. We’re already overwhelmed.” The United States has had a checkered history deploying bounty hunters, who at times were compensated for capturing, or killing, individuals. This notably happened during the Civil War with enlistment bounties to track down deserters. Governments in the expanding country offered money for Native American scalps in the 16th through 19th centuries. In recent and far less violent times, bail bondsmen have employed private detectives and bounty hunters to track down bail jumpers, and the U.S. Department of Justice has rewarded whistleblowers who uncover immigration violations in the workplace. There are laws across the country that allow intervener lawsuits with potential payouts for the third parties, including a statute in Texas that “deputizes” citizens to sue people providing or aiding in an abortion. The tracking contracts focus solely on immigrants. Right now, a lot of news media and citizens are monitoring immigration enforcement by federal officials. No doubt that focus will be extended to this new high-tech immigrant tracking chapter. What they said Rep. Greg Casar, D-Texas. (@RepCasar) “We have to ask ourselves: If Watergate happened today, would our biggest news outlets be allowed to run the story? Or would a billionaire owner decide that crossing the administration just isn’t worth it for his bottom line?” ...read more read less