Indian American Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL), a senior member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, has warned against a reported DHS “Bounty Hunter” plan to locate and track immigrants.
In a letter to Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem, he expressed “grave concern” over reports that DHS may hire private contractors to “locate, surveil, and report on individuals within immigrant communities for profit.”
As reported by The Intercept, Immigration enforcement agency ICE is currently considering awarding contracts to companies interested in providing “skip tracing” services that would deploy privatize investigators to track down immigrants residing inside the U.S.
The plan, according to the news outlet, calls for tasking these bounty hunters with conducting surveillance and ultimately pinpointing the home address of “aliens,” defined by the DHS as “a person who is not a citizen or national of the United States.”
They could earn bonus payments based on how many immigrants they help the government in apprehending, and how quickly.
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Krishnamoorthi warned that the proposal would “outsource one of the government’s most coercive powers to actors who operate with little oversight and limited public accountability.”
Such an arrangement, he wrote, “risks creating an enforcement apparatus that functions beyond the reach of ordinary checks and balances.”
Krishnamoorthi cautioned that “once the state begins contracting out its power to police, it invites the very abuses, secrecy, and corruption our founders sought to prevent.”
“When citizens can no longer discern who acts in the name of government, trust gives way to fear,” he wrote. “A government that rules through confusion and coercion rather than law and consent erodes its own legitimacy and the freedoms it exists to protect.”
Krishnamoorthi also outlined the dangers of performance-based enforcement contracts that would effectively establish a “bounty hunter” model.
“When the government pays private contractors based on how many people they can find, detain, or deliver, it turns them into bounty hunters,” he wrote. “In such a system built on quotas and cash rewards with minimal oversight, mistakes are not just possible—they are certain.”
Krishnamoorthi cited recent incidents of discriminatory enforcement, including a case in Illinois where a U.S. citizen was detained by DHS officers who “refused to believe her U.S. passport was real—because her appearance did not fit their assumptions about what someone with her last name ought to look like.”
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He warned that allowing private individuals to perform similar functions “will inevitably chill civic participation and deepen fear among law-abiding residents who already feel watched and vulnerable.”
Drawing historical parallels, Krishnamoorthi wrote that “when governments blur the line between official authority and private surveillance, societies inevitably pay a steep price in lost trust and personal freedom.”
“While today’s circumstances are different, any system that rewards private actors for reporting on one another risks repeating those same mistakes—undermining community cohesion, eroding the rule of law, and betraying American values,” he wrote.
Krishnamoorthi’s letter calls on DHS to answer key questions about the scope and legality of the proposed program, including what statutory or regulatory authority allows DHS to delegate investigatory or surveillance functions to private contractors.
Krishnamoorthi emphasized that “outsourcing immigration enforcement to profit-driven contractors undermines the very trust between government and the people it serves, and risks normalizing a system incompatible with American values and due process.”