Late last month, The Intercept reported that ICE intended to hire bounty hunters and private investigators for street-level verification work. Contractors will verify the home and work addresses of those targeted for removal by taking photographs of residences, documenting visitors, and marking workplaces and apartment complexes, among other techniques.
Those documents presented the initiative as a substantial but limited pilot program. Contractors were guaranteed a minimum of $250 and each contractor could not earn more than $90 million, while the total program was limited to $180 million. That structure pointed toward meaningful scale but still framed the effort as a controlled test, not an integral part of ICE’s removal operations.
The newly issued amendments dismantle that framework. ICE has removed the program’s spending limit and replaced it with a dramatically higher per-seller limit. Contractors can now individually earn up to $281.25 million and are guaranteed initial work orders worth at least $7.5 million. This change signals to ICE’s contracting base that it is no longer an experiment, but an investment, and the agency expects prime-level contractors to provide the staffing, technology, and field operations needed to function as a de facto branch of federal enforcement.
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment.
The proposed scope was already huge. It describes contractors who receive monthly recurring batches of 50,000 cases drawn from a docket of 1.5 million people. Private investigators will confirm individuals’ locations not only through commercial data brokers and open-source research, but also through personal visits when necessary. The filing outlines a performance-based structure with reward-like incentives: Firms would be paid a fixed price per case, plus bonuses for speed and accuracy, with vendors expected to propose their own incentive rates.
The contract also authorizes the Justice Department and other DHS components to issue their own orders under the program.
Previous filings indicated that private investigators could gain access to ICE’s internal case-management system—a database that includes photographs, biographical details, immigration history and other enforcement notes. This is reversed in the amended filing, stating that contractors will not be allowed inside the agency system under any circumstances. Instead, DHS will send contractors exported case packets containing a series of personal data on each target. This change limits direct exposure to federal systems, but still places large amounts of sensitive information in the hands of private surveillance firms operating outside the public domain.
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