Cash Bonuses for Locating Immigrants
An ICE procurement document reviewed by The Intercept solicits private contractors to locate immigrants in batches of ten thousand at a time, with monetary bonuses paid based on how many targets are successfully tracked down — the contractor model resembles a plan circulated earlier in the year by former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince.
#predatory capital #deportation machinery
A procurement document published by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, reviewed by The Intercept, solicits private contractors to locate immigrants and report their whereabouts to the government. Contractors would receive bundles of identifying information on ten thousand people at a time, in subsequent increments of up to one million, and would be paid bonuses tied to how many of those people they successfully tracked. The document calls the structure “incentive based pricing.” Bonuses might be issued, for instance, for finding ninety percent of targets within a set timeframe, or for confirming a correct address on the first try.
The document closely resembles a pitch circulated in February by a group of military contractors that included former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince — a “bounty program which provides a cash reward for each illegal alien held by a state or local law enforcement officer.” The change from February to October is that the pitch is no longer a private proposal but a federal solicitation: the bounty model has moved from outside the government to inside it, written in procurement language and ready for award.