U.S. Border Patrol wants a contractor to track down deported people abroad and collect their immigration fines
The agency gave bidders three business days to compete for a first-of-its-kind contract to collect fines from people it has deported to Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection is looking to hire a private company to find people the United States has already deported and collect unpaid immigration fines from them in Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala. It has given prospective bidders three business days to respond.
The solicitation was posted Tuesday morning and gives contractors until 2 p.m. Friday to submit quotes. It would set up one or more open-ended contracts for what CBP calls tracing and payment recovery services. These services include debt collection carried out overseas, in which a contractor locates each person, confirms the address, and hand-delivers a printed notice describing what they owe the U.S. government.
A review of the solicitation shows CBP estimates $423 million in unpaid penalties and fees across the Department of Homeland Security as of July 2026, and counts 66,387 people who owe civil fines to CBP and have since been removed from the country.
The fines are civil penalties the government imposes on people who stay after a deportation order or fail to leave under a voluntary departure agreement. The daily charge for defying a removal order, set at $500 in 1996 and adjusted for inflation, now amounts to $998 a day. DHS has applied it retroactively for as long as five years — enough to produce individual debts exceeding $1.8 million.
The department restarted the fines in June 2025 after years of dormancy and later cut the notice period and the window to appeal.
CBP already pays three private collection agencies to chase that debt. As of July 2026, those agencies have not located a single person outside the United States, and CBP has no collectors working abroad.
Skip-tracing is the work of finding people who don't necessarily want to be found — a search built on public records, online records, and government databases, and one that began in the private debt-collection industry.
Under the second Trump administration, DHS has spent roughly $118.45 million on skip-tracing services to find people inside the country, according to federal budget records reviewed by Project Salt Box. A so-called “skip trace” search depends on access to a variety of data sources, including motor vehicle, utility, credit and employment data the government does not have abroad. The new contract asks a company to run a harder version of this service in Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala.
The people a contractor would be sent to find were deported to one of three countries where extortion is among the most common and fastest-growing crimes. In Mexico, reported cases nearly doubled between 2016 and 2025, and the Global Organized Crime Index ranks the country among the world’s top five for extortion and racketeering, alongside Honduras. Officials estimate the true number is far higher, since almost no victims come forward. Much of the extortion is tied to organized crime, but a government anti-corruption operation has also produced the arrests of more than 70 local officials, some convicted of running extortion themselves. In Guatemala, the homicide rate rose to 17.4 per 100,000 people in 2025, a climb analysts attribute to renewed gang violence. Many of them left for the United States to escape conditions like these.
The CBP “payment recovery service” contract would send a private collector to find them in the countries they fled and demand payment — in effect, the government pursuing, for money, the same people it paid to send away.
To confirm it has found the right person, the document says a contractor may submit photographs of the home, utility bills, employment records, or a death certificate.
Payment must be collected through pay.gov, which the document says requires a U.S.-based bank account. Human Rights Watch, in a report on people deported from the United States to Mexico, documented that U.S. authorities confiscated the phones and identification of many of those it interviewed before removal, leaving them unable to open bank accounts or reach money they already had.
Quotes are due Friday at 2 p.m. CBP’s solicitation estimates an ordering period beginning Aug. 14 and running two years, with individual assignments issued as work arises.
CBP has not said how many contractors it intends to select, or whether it will award a contract at all.
There is no bottom to this regime’s corruption. They just keep going lower and lower.
Batshit crazy