A current pilot project aims to pay former law enforcement and military officers to physically track immigrants and verify their addresses to give to ICE for $300 each. There is no indication that the pilot involves licensed private investigators, and appears to be open to people who are now essentially members of the general public, 404 Media has learned.
The pilot is a dramatic, and potentially dangerous, escalation in the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign. People without any official role in government would be tasked with tracking down targets for ICE. It appears to be part of ICE’s broader plan to use bounty hunters or skip tracers to confirm immigrant’s addresses through data and physical surveillance. Some potential candidates for the pilot were recruited on LinkedIn and were told they would be given vehicles to monitor the targets.
“The more I listened to it, the more I’m like, something doesn’t sound right,” a person who was briefed on the pilot plans told 404 Media. 404 Media granted multiple people anonymity to speak more candidly and to avoid retaliation.
In a LinkedIn post in October, Jim Brown, president of government contractor consultant Feds United and a former longtime senior ICE official, said he was looking for retired law enforcement or military personnel for an upcoming project.
“Feds United is seeking approximately 20 more retired experienced law enforcement officers or retired military personnel in the DC/Northern Virginia area to participate in a 90-day pilot project that is expected to kick off within the next few weeks,” he wrote.
“The project will assess whether contractors can validate addresses associated with subjects of interest. Participants will work on surveillance teams and this is an OBSERVE and REPORT only task,” Brown wrote. Nearly two dozen people replied to that post, with many of them expressing interest in the work.
Brown’s LinkedIn post did not mention ICE, but two people briefed on the plans said the work would entail verifying information for ICE.
Feds United’s website says it is a “client-focused federal consulting firm that supplies subject matter experts to federal contractors to assist them in proposal response development and completing contract delivery services to the government client.” It claims to offer “subject matter experts” from ICE, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the Secret Service, and the FBI.
Recently on LinkedIn Brown has been posting positively about ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), and specifically the agency’s arrest of convicted criminals in the country illegally. Immigrants with no criminal record are now the largest group in ICE detention, according to data from September.
Brown said that ICE does not have good addresses for some of its targets, one person briefed on the plans recalled. Feds United would give recruited individuals a list of addresses based on things like utility bills, the person said. Feds United would split the people into teams to perform the surveillance, and after verifying the target lived at the address each person on the team would be paid $300, they added. This would go up to a maximum of $30,000, they said.
“Do not talk to the neighbors,” the person said, recalling the plans. “This was strictly supposed to be observe and report,” referring to a tactic where they are not supposed to directly interact with anyone.
Broadly these details of the pilot line up with ICE’s strategy laid out in procurement documents reported in the media and reviewed by 404 Media. At the end of October, ICE published a Request for Information (RFI) asking interested contractors to contact the agency. Companies would be given information on 10,000 immigrants to locate, with further packages going up to 1,000,000, the Intercept reported. Contractors would be paid “monetary bonuses” based on performance, the document said.
This month 404 Media reported that ICE has allocated $180 million to hiring bounty hunters and skip tracers to stalk immigrants. Other procurement documents said ICE was seeking assistance with a “docket size” of 1.5 million, and the agency would give contractors a batch of 50,000 last known addresses of aliens residing in the U.S. Bounty hunters or skip tracers would then verify the people who lived at those addresses, or find their new location, and provide that information to ICE’s ERO.
“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. The vendor will then report the physical location to the Government or inform the Government that it is not able to locate the alien, and any additional visits would be fruitless. The vendor should prioritize locating the home address and only resort to employment location, failing that,” one of the documents said.
“It is outrageous that ICE is funneling taxpayer money into a surveillance operation aimed at immigrants instead of real threats. It is as wasteful as it is disgraceful,” Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chairman Rep. Adriano Espaillat told 404 Media in a statement. “Every crime that goes uninvestigated is on this administration for diverting law enforcement capacity toward Stephen Miller’s political fantasies rather than true public safety.”
Private investigators and skip tracers 404 Media spoke to had mixed reactions to ICE’s plan. One was concerned about the outsourcing of government functions to private industry, while another said they would do the work.
One of the people briefed on the Virginia and DC pilot said Feds United was subcontracting under SOS International LLC, or SOSi, which is a large government contractor. In October the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) signed a $7 million contract with SOSi for skip tracing services, The Lever reported.
“I do not comment on current projects where I am not the prime vendor,” Brown from Feds United told 404 Media. SOSi did not respond to a request for comment. When asked specifically if SOSi would be able to comment on the pilot, Brown said “after my years of federal training, my response is ‘I cannot confirm nor deny who my client is.’”
None of the people briefed on the plan who spoke to 404 Media are licensed private investigators. In Virginia, private investigators must apply and be registered with the state’s Department of Criminal Justice Services. In DC, private investigators and security professionals similarly need to apply for a license. But in Feds United’s case, the company appears to be trying to recruit people simply on whether they are former military or law enforcement, despite them being asked to perform physical surveillance of targets.
“It’s probably because of the surge of work that they send out these unlicensed individuals to see how they do and eventually they plan to roll them in under their company license of the general contractor,” Igor Ostrovskiy, an experienced private investigator with Ostro Intelligence, and who has expressed concerns with ICE’s plans, told 404 Media. He called the plan dangerous, especially if the people are armed.
“I’ve done large contracts [...] and it just didn’t track,” one of the other people briefed on the plans said.
