Because Immigration and Customs Enforcement is flush with cash and has no guardrails, agency officials are going to hire bounty hunters. And they’ve got $180 million to do it.
What could possibly go wrong?
It’s difficult to imagine that the lawless, all-of-government approach that the Trump administration has deployed to terrorize immigrants and blue cities across the country somehow isn’t enough. Federal agents are already running around masked, even when there are laws against that. They don’t wear identification, because they don’t wanna. They make violent arrests. They lie in court about what they’re doing. They terrorize toddlers, but those toddlers are definitely the worst of the worst, right?
Okay, but what if we also empowered private citizens to surveil and harass people? Wouldn’t that be great?
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404 Media reviewed documents posted by ICE on Monday, and things are not great. Basically, ICE has a list of 1.5 million people, and they will give bounty hunters a batch of 50,000 names at a time with the last-known addresses of alleged undocumented immigrants.
Then, the bounty hunters get to use whatever surveillance data they can get their mitts on “before moving onto physical surveillance.” Oh, and “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.”
That is a fancy, dispassionate way of saying that the bounty hunter can go to the homes and the jobs of anyone on the list spit out by ICE, which definitely surely has no errors and hasn’t scooped up the wrong people. After that, they feed them to ICE.
Bounty hunters are, of course, not government employees, and therefore don’t have even the meager restrictions that ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents might face. Additionally, even though some states, like Minnesota, bar bounty hunters from pretending to be law enforcement and dressing up like them, in a world where ICE agents are anonymous and drive unmarked vehicles, who is going to know the difference?
One private investigator told 404 Media that the concern was that “the idea that we can be mistaken for doing ICE operations will put us at risk in the field. 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.”
Yeah, joining the side of masked marauders will do that to you.
Surely, incentivizing bounty hunters with financial rewards based on how many people they find will not result in bounty hunters scooping up as many people as possible, right? And it won’t incentivize any bad behavior, because bounty hunters are good and law-abiding, right?
Bloomberg reported that in Nevada, which is apparently a bounty hunter haven, the Department of Insurance had 459 pages of complaints about bounty hunters. We’re talking harassment, stalking, excessive force—so, basically, what ICE and CBP are already doing.
Related | ICE is paying retirees big bucks to come back and terrorize immigrants
It really is astonishing the lengths the Trump administration is willing to go on this. ICE is already paying ridiculous incentives to get people to work there, and the administration keeps yanking government workers from their jobs and reassigning them to ICE. And then, of course, there’s the troops.
But it’s just not enough. They’re never gonna hit racist White House adviser Stephen Miller’s numbers this way. So, if they can’t get enough government employees to do the dirty deed, it’s time to call Dog the Bounty Hunter.
Republished with permission from Daily Kos.
