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INSIDE ICE’S PLANS FOR A BOUNTY HUNTER ARMY  
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Katya Schwenk
November 6, 2025
The Lever
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_ Military contractors called for — and are now getting —
contracts to help carry out Trump’s mass deportations, with a bounty
for every immigrant they track down. _

ICE agents make an arrest in Illinois on Sept. 19, 2025., (AP Photo /
Erin Hooley)

 

In February, at the start of the Trump administration’s immigration
crackdown, news broke that a group of military contractors was
circulating a blueprint for mass deportations, to be carried out by
private contractors.

Led by Erik Prince, Trump ally and founder of the notorious mercenary
firm Blackwater, the group proposed (among other ideas) that
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) create a “skip tracing
team” that would send out private contractors to hunt down
immigrants targeted for deportation, per reporting at the time by
_Politico_
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Now, there are indications ICE is carrying out those plans.

Last month, _The Lever _revealed
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that ICE had signed a $7 million contract with defense contractor SOS
International for “skip tracing services.” SOS International, also
known as SOSi, has long done business with the federal government,
including working with the U.S. military
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in Afghanistan — and has business ties to one of the military
contractors whose name was listed alongside Prince’s in the
proposal.

It was the first time, per online federal procurement databases, that
an ICE contract description contained the phrase “skip tracing,” a
term usually associated with debt collection and bounty hunting. There
was little further detail about the services SOSi would provide to
Trump’s immigration enforcers.

The contract — with its eerie callback to the Prince deportation
blueprint — appears not to be a fluke. Several days later, ICE
signed another “skip tracing” contract
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this time worth up to $33.5 million, with international debt collector
Global Recovery Group LLC. 

Then, on Friday, as _The Intercept _first reported
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ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations bureau, the agency’s
primary deportation arm, released procurement documents
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that mapped out new plans to create a bounty-hunting program that
would deploy skip tracing methods. Though the documents are
preliminary, ICE’s proposed program hews closely to the blueprint
drawn up in February by Prince and his cadre of military
contractors. 

Under the program, private contractors will deploy “all technology
systems available” to locate ICE’s targets, the documents say.
Contractors would be given a list of 10,000 names at a time and be
allowed to ultimately locate “up to 1,000,000” individuals, per
the records. 

ICE already has plenty of technology at its disposal to identify and
track down immigrants, an arsenal that the agency is further building
out
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now that it is flush with cash. But the “skip tracing team”
appears distinct in that its mandate would include sending out
privately contracted bounty hunters to systematically identify
immigrants’ residences and workplaces. 

The bounty hunting program would include “performance-based
incentives” — cash bonuses for vendors who successfully hunt down
immigrants for ICE. This cash payout idea appears to be pulled
directly from the Prince memo, which suggested that ICE build out a
“bounty program which provides a cash reward for each illegal alien
held by a state or local law enforcement officer.”

To judge from ICE’s first skip tracing contracts with SOSi and
Global Recovery Group LLC, which are together worth over $40 million,
the program will prove yet another gold mine for the military
contractors clamoring for their cut of the Trump administration’s
multibillion-dollar immigration spending blitz. And that makes sense:
It was drafted by those same vendors.

FROM BLACKWATER TO BOUNTY HUNTING

The core message of Prince’s deportation plan was this: If President
Donald Trump wanted to carry out his stated goals of mass
deportations, he couldn’t do so alone. “The government,” the
plan said, “should enlist outside assistance.”

Although _Politico _did not publish the complete text of the proposal,
what has been made public from the document indicates that Prince was
making the suggestion as part of the “special entity” 2USV, a
group of defense contractors. (An LLC with the same name has been
registered in Wyoming
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but many details about the project remain unclear.)

The contractors include former Blackwater employees like Bill Mathews,
the company’s former vice president, who pleaded guilty
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to fraud charges
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related to his work at the mercenary firm, as well as Richard Pere,
former head [[link removed]] of a
Blackwater aviation subsidiary
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Most of the Blackwater alumni have not been formally associated with
the company in years. Blackwater has gone through a series of
acquisitions and name changes since Prince sold the firm
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in 2010; its latest form is the private security conglomerate
Constellis, which still operates
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the flagship Blackwater training center in North Carolina and is now
trying to [[link removed]]
“drive strategic growth” in its border-operations work.

So far, there are no clear ties between Prince’s current business
ventures — including Vectus Global, a murky security firm that is
sending drones and mercenaries
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to the Haitian government — and the vendors now inking deals to
carry out ICE’s new bounty-hunting program. But at least one other
contractor involved in the initial proposal has business ties to the
companies that have been tapped to carry out the plans.

Louis Gobern, one of the names listed in the initial Prince memo, is
currently the president [[link removed]] of
Resilient Logistics Services & Solutions, a defense contractor that
advertises [[link removed]] its work with the Department
of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense. The company names
SOS International [[link removed]], ICE’s new skip
tracing contractor, as an “industry partner,” and both companies
have previously worked as subcontractors
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the same Customs and Border Protection contract.

SOS International has been vying for Department of Homeland Security
contracts in recent months, poaching
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one of ICE’s top intelligence chiefs, Andre Watson, in August. The
company boasted
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that Watson, who helped run
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the ICE program targeting students for political speech, would help
the contractor “expand its business and deliver capabilities to the
federal and state law enforcement agencies.”

When _Politico _contacted Mathews, one of the former Blackwater
executives, about the proposal in February, he claimed he had heard
nothing from the Trump administration about moving forward with the
bounty hunter program. 

“There has been zero show of interest or engagement from the
government, and we have no reason to believe there will be,” he
said.

If ICE’s recent multimillion-dollar spending spree is any
indication, that is changing.

_Katya Schwenk is a journalist based in Phoenix, Arizona. Her
reporting and essays have appeared in The Intercept, the Baffler, the
American Prospect, and elsewhere. Send tips via Signal: 413-658-4677_

* ICE arrests;
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* bounty hunters
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* Military Indstial Complex
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