source: American Immigration Council
The federal government’s hunt for immigrants is ramping up. Each month, private contractors receive tens of thousands of names from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and are asked to locate those individuals as quickly as possible so that ICE can conduct targeted enforcement operations to arrest and detain those individuals. What makes this system new is not just its scale — contractors may receive up to 50,000 names per month, with the program potentially targeting more than 1 million people — but how it is achieved. Contractors are using a mix of data tools, online research, and, increasingly, artificial intelligence to locate people — allowing for a faster and much larger sweep than before.
This is called skip tracing: finding someone using public records, databases, online information, and, sometimes, physical surveillance. Skip tracing has long been used by debt collectors, bail bondsmen, and private investigators. Now it is being used by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to find individuals for immigration enforcement. While skip tracing has traditionally been used by private entities, its use in government immigration enforcement raises new legal questions about privacy, due process, and the role of private actors in government surveillance.
ICE skip tracing involves using government data, online research, and in-person verification — such as taking photos of a person’s home or workplace — to confirm their whereabouts. Zoom out, and it reveals a massive AI-assisted surveillance system targeting more than 1 million immigrants in the United States.
Reporting by Scripps News found that ICE awarded contracts to 13 private companies to provide “skip tracing services nationwide.” These open-ended contracts were issued in December 2025 and could total $1.2 billion over two years. The Intercept estimated that up to 1.5 million immigrants could be targeted using a mix of digital tools and in-person surveillance.
So how does this system work?
ICE is building a nationwide network of private, plainclothes contractors who are asked to:
- Locate individuals
- Verify addresses
- Take time-stamped photos of homes and workplaces
Contractors are given personal data, including names, dates of birth, addresses, and contact information. Each company may receive up to 50,000 cases per month and is instructed to first use all technology available, as reported by The Washington Post, to locate individuals. If that fails, contractors can move to physical, in-person surveillance. The program relies on a combination of government records, commercial data sources, and online information, although details about which specific databases are being used, how the accuracy of the data is being verified, and how any errors are corrected have not been made public.
For attorneys, this means that client location data may be collected, verified, and shared with ICE through third-party contractors — potentially before ICE ever contacts the individual directly. According to ICE documents shared with The Washington Post, the information gathered by contractors “may lead to raids” or other enforcement actions, including arrests or removal proceedings.
Some of the companies contracted by ICE have backgrounds in military or intelligence work, such as Bluehawk LLC, SOS International, and Gravitas, and have used artificial intelligence and large language models as part of their work. These are firms that have traditionally supported national security, military defense, or private investigations — not routine civil immigration enforcement.
Bluehawk, for example, has held contracts with the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies for over a decade, focusing on intelligence collection and analysis.
Gravitas Investigations, which could earn more than $32 million from the contract, describes its services as “comprehensive surveillance operations” — the kind of work often used in fraud investigations and corporate cases — combining online research with real-world tracking.
Another contractor is BI Incorporated, a subsidiary of the for-profit prison company GEO Group. GEO Group already operates immigration detention centers across the country. Now, through skip tracing, the company can also profit from locating immigrants that it will later detain. Its skip-tracing contract alone could generate up to $121 million, separate from its detention operations, meaning the company stands to benefit from multiple stages of the enforcement process.
The federal government’s expanded private contracts and use of skip tracing raise troubling concerns on many levels.
The far reach of AI
Certain companies advertise AI agents and large language models that can identify individuals and map out their networks of family and associates. These systems can pull together data from both public and private sources.
Even when AI is not the only tool, it is increasingly used to justify and scale these efforts — allowing contractors to process more cases faster and across wider geographic areas. But scaling surveillance in this way also increases the risk of error: recent cases show how AI tools, including facial recognition systems like Clearview AI, have misidentified individuals, leading to wrongful arrests and months of detention for people who had no connection to the alleged activity.
The incentive structure
Under the ICE contracts, businesses are rewarded for speed, receiving bonuses if they can verify a person’s location within 7 or 14 days. This incentive structure — paying more for faster results — risks compromising due process, accuracy, and the ethics of the information and how it is gathered, verified, and reported. As Sharon Bradford Franklin, former chair of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, told Scripps News, the companies are essentially acting as ICE bounty hunters, “It’s the same kind of incentive situation.”
Lack of oversight and accountability
Many of the contracts have not been made public, and the rules governing their activities remain unclear. Questions also remain about how closely parent companies oversee their subsidiaries. In one case, the contractor, Paris-based Capgemini, launched an internal review after French government officials raised concerns about its involvement in the program and called for greater transparency.
The ever-expanding surveillance system
From a broader perspective, skip tracing reflects larger trends in data-driven immigration enforcement. Enforcement is no longer carried out solely by federal agents but is increasingly distributed across a network of private companies, data brokers, and state and local agencies. At the same time, surveillance of specific populations is becoming more normalized.
Skip tracing is not just about finding people. It is about building a system — a surveillance supply chain in which artificial intelligence amplifies existing legal and ethical concerns. By making it easier to collect, analyze, and act on large amounts of data, AI allows enforcement agencies to operate at a previously unimaginable scale. As this system expands, it risks eroding privacy, increasing errors, and shifting critical decisions about people’s lives further away from transparency and accountability.
