ICE taps GEO Group subsidiary to track immigrants in $121 million deal

The ‘skip tracing’ contract will supercharge surveillance of immigrants, financial incentives will turn contractors into bounty hunters, critics say.

The federal government has hired a company owned by a controversial private prison firm to track immigrants they’re looking to deport, even as experts and civil rights activists condemn the move as a “recipe for disaster.”

Under a two-year, $121 million contract between U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and a subsidiary of GEO Group called BI Incorporated, the company will perform “skip tracing” services for the federal government. GEO Group is the same private prison company that runs numerous immigrant detention centers, including Delaney Hall in Newark.

According to an announcement about the contract, the work includes “enhanced location research with identifiable information, commercial data verification, and physical observation to verify current address information and investigate alternative address information for individuals on the federal government’s non-detained docket.”

In other words, the company will be searching public records and other data sources to track down the undocumented immigrants ICE hasn’t been able to find yet, experts said.

In the statement announcing the deal, GEO Group Chairman George Zoley crowed that the contract “is a testament to the high-quality solutions BI has provided to ICE for more than 21 years.”

But others, including advocates for immigrants, academics, and civil liberties watchdogs, say the federal government’s decision to outsource and effectively privatize data mining and surveillance operations will lead to nothing but trouble.

“Basically, it’s going to be what we would think of as bounty hunting — minus the ability to actually physically detain someone,” said Lori Nessel, a law professor at Seton Hall University and director of the school’s Immigrants’ Rights and International Human Rights Law Clinic.

“But what’s really disturbing is the language allows for ‘all available technology’ in terms of the surveillance. So there are huge privacy concerns,” she told The Jersey Vindicator.

Nessel also said the contract is incentive-based, which will encourage the firm to find as many people as it can, and quickly. That rush to meet a quota often leads to mistakes and constitutional violations.

She also suspects there will be little transparency about how, exactly, BI Incorporated goes about its work.

“It’s not clear where the legal authority comes from for a government agency to contract out this type of law enforcement function without limits,” she said. “So, I’m not sure where the accountability and oversight will come from … It’s a recipe for disaster.”

The deal has also attracted the attention of at least one member of Congress, and he expressed similar concerns in a November letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

“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,” Democratic Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois wrote.

“Once the state begins contracting out its power to police, it invites the very abuses, secrecy, and corruption our founders sought to prevent,” Krishnamoorthi, who is also running for the U.S. Senate, said. “The idea of authorizing unknown private individuals to walk through neighborhoods, observing, photographing, and verifying the whereabouts of those they believe to be undocumented, is deeply troubling.”

Dillon Reisman, a staff attorney with the New Jersey chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, also worried that the contractor happens to be a subsidiary of GEO Group, which has for months been accused of abusing and neglecting detainees at Delaney Hall.

“We know what GEO Group has done in our state — it’s caused our communities immense harm in their private, underregulated detention centers,” Reisman said. “Why would we trust this specific company with our data and with this task that is inherently harmful to civil liberties?”

BI Incorporated did not respond to a request for comment. A GEO Group representative referred inquiries to ICE, but representatives for the agency also did not respond.

How skip tracing works

Skip tracing isn’t new, experts said.

But it’s usually performed by real law enforcement agencies trying to find missing people who skipped out on bail, a debt, or a court date, according to David Opderbeck, a Seton Hall law professor and the co-director of the Gibbons Institute of Law, Science & Technology and the school’s Institute for Privacy Protection.

The job’s gotten easier as more and more public records migrate online, and recent leaps in artificial intelligence will let contractors use automated tools to scrape social media profiles and other parts of the web.

“It’s getting pretty sophisticated,” Opderbeck said.

And because ICE has information-sharing agreements with other federal agencies — including the IRS — contractors will likely be able to get their hands on tax records and other financial documents, he said.

“It’s always a concern when you’ve got a third-party contractor handling potentially very sensitive data,” he said. “Who knows what civil rights guardrails are built into this contract? I doubt many.”

Opderbeck worried ICE could weaponize the information against legal immigrants and those with valid asylum claims — or citizen watchdog groups who constantly protest the agency.

“Governments have been doing this kind of stuff for a long time,” he said. “But there’s a big potential for overly aggressive surveillance and maybe abuse of these tools … that’s pretty frightening to me.”

Nessel, his Seton Hall colleague, agreed.

“I think everyone needs to be concerned about losing privacy protections,” she said. “It’s not just going to affect immigrants, undocumented immigrants, lawful immigrants. It’ll be U.S. citizens, it will be all of us that will be impacted by this surveillance.”

The final details of ICE’s plan are still unclear, but the U.S. Department of Homeland Security gave a glimpse of the operation in documents obtained by The Intercept via a Freedom of Information request in late October.

In the nine-page document, the agency said it wants its contractor to use “government-furnished case data with identifiable information, commercial data verification, and physical observation services to verify alien address information, investigate alternative alien address information, confirm the new location of aliens, and deliver materials/documents to aliens as appropriate.”

That might include searching through public records, social media sites, and other apps for information, then using the results to track down an undocumented immigrant’s home and job.

The request also asked for “a collection of photos and documents” to verify the addresses, and asked contractors to document each visit and provide “time-stamped photographs of the location.”

Then they would report back to the feds as soon as possible.

Given the Trump administration’s fixation on deporting millions of undocumented immigrants, the work will be plentiful. Department of Homeland Security officials said its initial docket would include the names of 10,000 people, and that could balloon up to 1 million over time.

The agency also offered an “incentive-based pricing structure” that pays out based on the contractor’s success rate, according to the document.

For example, the Department of Homeland Security will pay more if the contractor verifies an immigrant’s home on the first try or finishes 90% of the caseload before the deadline.

“This encourages the vendor to prioritize accuracy, efficiency, and professionalism in their operations,” an agency official wrote.

In his letter, Krishnamoorthi, the Illinois congressman, pilloried the Department of Homeland Security and ICE for those pay incentives, which he said turn contractors into bounty hunters.

“In such a system built on quotas and cash rewards with minimal oversight, mistakes are not just possible — they are certain. When that happens, it is not a paperwork error but an entirely predictable violation of rights with real human costs,” Krishnamoorthi wrote.

“This approach does not invite abuse; it guarantees it, putting the liberty and well-being of the American public at risk,” he wrote.

Reisman, of the ACLU, would agree.

“It’s really dangerous to get private companies invested in the mission of investigating, arresting, and detaining people — it makes the incentives profit-based,” he said.

“That means the system is not geared towards justice or mercy or fairness,” he said. “It’s geared towards getting more money.”