Summary
US Customs and Border Protection is seeking to hire private investigators to track down deported immigrants and others who have left the United States, and press them into paying the government money, according to records reviewed by WIRED. The work would cover Mexico, Honduras, and Guatemala, and potentially other countries. The documents, which cap the so-called Tracing and Payment Recovery Services program at 84 billion in fines](https://www.dhs.gov/news/2026/07/23/dhs-announces-more-84-billion-civil-fines-issued-illegal-aliens) to immigrants it has accused of failing to depart the United States, citing an obscure provision of a 1996 immigration law that sat unused until Donald Trump’s first term. Those fines run against people who are still in the country, at 1.8 million. Hasan Shafiqullah, the Legal Aid Society’s immigration supervising attorney, says he’s seen some third-party collection agencies add [5,130 fee Congress created last year for people ordered removed in absentia and later arrested by ICE, which the statute bars from waiving or reducing. Someone who left through the app on the promise of a clean slate could still carry that balance. Alina Das, a law professor and director of NYU’s Immigrant Rights Clinic, says going after people who have left the country with outstanding fines would be a “significant escalation in tactics.” Charles Moore, a senior attorney at Public Justice, says that the move is “part and parcel” with the Trump administration’s harsh anti-immigration efforts and that it is likely meant to deter people in the countries targeted from wanting to come to the US in the future. The three debt collection agencies CBP already uses have tried to reach people overseas by letter and phone. As of July, according to the documents, they had not located a single person outside the US. At that time, they say, the government had removed an estimated 66,387 people carrying unpaid CBP fines and penalties. CBP referred WIRED’s questions to DHS, which did not provide a comment before publication. Mexico’s foreign ministry, Guatemala’s ministry of foreign affairs, and Honduras’s secretariat of foreign affairs did not respond to questions about whether the United States had consulted them or whether they would cooperate with the contractors. “It makes no sense to go after people here if they don’t have the money,” says Shafiqullah, who is suing the federal government over the fines. “Presumably they don’t have the money there, and they’re not subject to collections. What’s the point of this?” Senators Dick Durbin and Alex Padilla wrote to acting attorney general Todd Blanche and Homeland Security secretary Markwayne Mullin in July, asking them to stop applying the fines to immigrants who are complying with the law. They asked how many penalties had gone to people with pending or lawful status, or to survivors of domestic violence and trafficking, and how many had been referred to private debt collectors. They asked for answers by July 31. Durbin’s office tells WIRED neither department responded. “Since day one, the Trump administration has carried out a vindictive mass deportation campaign, which has included slapping arbitrary and potentially unlawful 1.2 billion](https://www.scrippsnews.com/investigations/ice-inc/small-companies-score-big-contracts-to-search-for-undocumented-immigrants) over the next two years, according to records first reported by Scripps News. The companies are expected to send ICE photos and documents confirming where a person lives or works, and can earn bonuses based on the number of people found. Sharon Bradford Franklin, the former chairwoman of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, told Scripps the arrangement makes the companies essentially ICE bounty hunters. What CBP is after now is effectively the same structure, pointed instead at people already forced from the country. “Going after folks who are abroad is going to undermine their purported promise to forgive these fines once someone has left the country,” says Moore. “But that doesn’t surprise me.” Comments Back to top