Claim:
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will spend $180 million on bounty hunters to track down “aliens,” meaning people without lawful status in the U.S.
Rating:
What’s True
ICE published a contract proposal seeking vendors to carry out “skip tracing” of 1.5 million people without legal status in the U.S. The agency originally offered contracts worth up to $180 million, but later adjusted the amount to more than $281 million.
What’s False
ICE did not specifically write in its proposal that it was seeking bounty hunters, meaning licensed agents who track down and detain people who have skipped bail, for the skip tracing work.
What’s Undetermined
ICE had not confirmed whether it was specifically seeking bounty hunters at the time of this writing. Professions like bounty hunters, debt collectors and private investigators all use skip tracing in their work.
In November 2025 a claim (archived) circulated online that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) would spend $180 million on bounty hunters to track down “aliens,” meaning people without lawful status in the U.S.
Rumors about the Trump administration using bounty hunters — also known as bail enforcement agents or fugitive recovery agents — to carry out its deportation goals, have circulated since the start of U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term.
One Threads user who shared the claim in November 2025 wrote, “This isn’t a rumor. ICE is hiring Bounty Hunters and giving them cash bonuses for acting as fast as possible. It’s official government policy.”
That user explained in a video that he had read about ICE’s rumored use of bounty hunters in a report by The Intercept, a nonprofit investigate journalism outlet.
The claim also circulated on Facebook (archived), X (archived), Instagram (archived) and Reddit (archived).
According to SAM.gov, an official U.S. government website that lists contracts offered by government departments and agencies to private contractors, in November 2025, ICE offered contracts worth up to $281,250,000 for “skip tracing” services as part of its effort to locate a docket of 1.5 million “aliens.”
Skip tracing is the process of locating a person for any reason, including someone who is deliberately trying to avoid or skip detection. Law enforcement, debt collectors and bail bondsmen all use skip tracing to find fugitives, debtors or people who skipped bail. Bounty hunters, meaning licensed agents who enter into a deal with a bail bondsman to find and detain a person who has skipped bail, might use skip tracing to find their target.
The DHS/ICE skip tracing proposal did not include the word “bounty hunter” and did not specify whether the agency would prefer inquiries from specific types of vendors. The term bounty hunter appeared to have made its way into the claim through reports from outlets like The Intercept and 404 Media. Sam Biddle, who reported on the contract proposal for the Intercept, told Snopes via email the outlet’s report used the term “bounty hunter” in a more general way to mean a person who would be “hunting people for a monetary bounty.”
Given that ICE offered contracts for skip tracing but did not specifically seek licensed bounty hunters, we rate this claim a mixture of true, false and undetermined elements.
Snopes reached out to 404 Media to ask how it backed their use of the term bounty hunter in reports. We also reached out to ICE with additional questions about the proposal. We await replies to our queries.
ICE ‘skip tracers’ to locate 1.5 million people
According to publicly available documents, ICE wrote that it was looking to locate around 1.5 million people without lawful status in the U.S. and could offer contracts worth up to $281,250,000 for skip tracing services in order to achieve that goal.
ICE’s Statement of Work said that vendors would be tasked with finding people’s home addresses or, failing that, addresses for places of work and reporting that information back to ICE. Vendors were expected to investigate at least 50,000 people per month.
The agency wrote that, “The vendor must have a working knowledge/background in using investigatory tools to conduct advanced skip tracing using last known addresses.” Bounty hunters could fit that description but so could private investigators or ex-law enforcement personnel.
In late October 2025, ICE issued a request for information, a way for the agency to assess market interest, for what would eventually become its contract proposal for skip tracing.
In that request, ICE said it was considering an “incentive based pricing structure” that could provide bonuses or fee adjustments for vendors who could deliver results quickly and with high accuracy. That proposed reward structure did not feature in the contract proposal ICE eventually published in late November.
Private companies have sought to involve themselves with the Trump administration’s deportation plans since early in Trump’s second term. In February 2025, Politico reported that a group of prominent military contractors had circulated a White Paper outlining a $25 billion plan that reportedly included “a network of ‘processing camps’ on military bases, a private fleet of 100 planes, and a ‘small army’ of private citizens empowered to make arrests.”
According to Politico’s report, Bill Mathews, the former chief operating officer of Blackwater, one of the companies that submitted the White Paper, reportedly said in February that there had been “zero show of interest or engagement from the government” with relation to the proposed plan.
At the time of this writing, ICE had not returned a request for comment on whether it would hire bounty hunters for skip tracing or whether it would give vendors who carried out the work the authority to arrest the people they traced.
Snopes previously reported on a claim that ICE considered “deputizing” bounty hunters in Washington and a since-failed bill in Mississippi that would pay bounty hunters to help deport people without lawful status in the U.S.
