Bounty hunters are in line to become the next tool of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement under a procurement document reviewed by the Intercept, the website reported Friday.

"Under the plan, bounty hunters may receive 'monetary bonuses' depending on how successfully they track down their targets — and how many immigrants they then report to ICE," the report said. "According to the document, which solicits information from interested contractors for a potentially forthcoming contract opportunity, companies hired by ICE will be given bundles of information on 10,000 immigrants at a time to locate, with further assignments provided in 'increments of 10,000 up to 1,000,000.'"

ICE is seeking a high-tech, low-civil liberties operation.

"Contractors will surveil their target to confirm the accuracy of their home address, including 'time-stamped photographs of the location,' before reporting back to ICE. The vendor should prioritize the alien’s residence,” the document notes, “but failing that will attempt to verify place of employment.

"The plan entails not just on-the-ground monitoring, but the use of digital surveillance."

Additionally, "ICE will be given bundles of information on 10,000 immigrants at a time to locate, with further assignments provided in increments of 10,000 up to 1,000,000.”

On Bluesky, poster Russ commented, "ICE to hire bounty hunters to hunt migrants for cash. Texas hunts women for cash. The US government hunts people for cash. They aren't keeping people out. They are trapping us in."

The Department of Homeland Security says it intends to add state driver’s license information to a swiftly expanding federal system envisioned as a one-stop shop for checking citizenship.

The plan, outlined in a public notice posted Thursday, is the latest step in an unprecedented Trump administration initiative to pool confidential data from varied sources that it claims will help identify noncitizens on voter rolls, tighten immigration enforcement and expose public benefit fraud.

According to emails obtained by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, DHS approached Texas officials in June about a pilot program to add the state’s driver license data, but it’s not clear if the state participated.

Earlier this year, DHS added millions of Americans’ Social Security data to the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, system, allowing officials to use the tool to conduct bulk searches of voter rolls for the first time. According to the document filed Thursday, SAVE also recently expanded to include passport and visa information.

Incorporating driver’s license information would allow election officials whose rolls don’t include voters’ Social Security numbers to conduct bulk searches by driver’s license number. Ultimately, the system would link these two crucial identifiers for the purpose of citizenship checks, said Michael Morse, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

“It is the key that unlocks everything,” Morse said.

State driver’s license databases often include a variety of sensitive information on drivers, including place of birth, passport number, biometrics, address, email and employment information, said Claire Jeffrey, a spokesperson for the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators.

Beyond the privacy concerns this creates, using driver’s license numbers in SAVE could lead to citizens being wrongly flagged as noncitizens, said Rachel Orey, director of the elections project at the Bipartisan Policy Center. Driver’s license numbers are sometimes reused and people can have licenses in multiple states. Also, if SAVE isn’t linked to live versions of state driver’s license databases, the information in the system will be outdated.

“This could have far-reaching consequences for voter access and public trust if inaccurate data were used to question eligibility or citizenship,” Orey said.

DHS says in the notice that linking to driver’s license data, which it calls the most widely used form of identification, “will allow SAVE to match against other sources to verify immigration status and U.S. citizenship, which will improve accuracy and efficiency for SAVE user agencies.”

The department did not respond to questions about the expansion.

Up until this year, SAVE was mostly used to check individual immigrants’ citizenship status when they applied for public benefits. DHS has said the aim in expanding the system was to enable election officials to check voter rolls en masse. But the agency’s data-sharing agreement with the Social Security Administration as well as Thursday’s disclosure make clear that DHS and other agencies can use SAVE for other purposes, including for immigration enforcement investigations.

Information uploaded into the system by state and local election officials and other users will be saved and may be “shared with other DHS Components that have a need to know of the information to carry out their national security, law enforcement, immigration, intelligence, or other homeland security functions,” the notice explains.

Advocacy groups have sued the federal government claiming the pooling of data in SAVE violates the Privacy Act, which is meant to prevent misuse of private data. In filings, the government has said that the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 explicitly allows information sharing to verify citizenship status and that DHS would exercise caution in flagging voters as potential noncitizens.

Some privacy lawyers called DHS’ move to add driver’s license information more evidence of federal overreach. “The administration wants to get as much data as it can, however it can, whenever it can,” said Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University.

The DHS notice, known as a system of records notice, allows for public comment on several aspects of SAVE’s expansion, including some already completed. Typically, such notices are filed when agencies propose changes to federal systems, and the comments are meant to inform how officials go forward. That didn’t happen in this case.

In June, email records show, DHS asked the Texas Department of Public Safety, which issues driver’s licenses and ID cards, to partner on a pilot program to add its data into SAVE.

Timothy Benz of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the branch of DHS that oversees SAVE, wrote that the planned expansion was part of the “evolution” of SAVE into a “one-stop shop for all election agency verification needs.”

“That would require collaboration with each states’ DL agency in order for us to query those DL records in order to provide that information to the querying elections agency,” Benz wrote.

Rebekah Hibbs, a supervisor in the Texas Department of Public Safety’s driver’s license division, replied that DPS is “always happy” to support the SAVE tool and agreed to talk again with USCIS.

It’s not clear what happened next. In response to questions from ProPublica and the Tribune, DPS spokesperson Sheridan Nolen said the “department does not have any ongoing projects with USCIS related to driver record information for registered voters, nor have we been asked to provide that information.”

She did not answer questions about whether DPS has given any data to USCIS. DHS did not respond to questions about whether the partnership moved forward.

Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson announced Oct. 20 that her office had run the state’s entire voter roll through SAVE. Alicia Pierce, Nelson’s spokesperson, said the office did the check using full Social Security numbers, which it routinely obtains from the Department of Public Safety to match with registered voters.

The results showed that around 0.015% of Texas voters, or 2,724 people, are potentially noncitizens.

At least one Texas official is concerned that those initial SAVE results may not be accurate. In a court filing submitted Wednesday as part of the Privacy Act litigation, Travis County voter registration director Christopher Davis wrote that state data shows about 25% of the voters that SAVE flagged as potential noncitizens in the county had provided proof of citizenship when registering to vote.

“I am concerned that the list Travis County received from the Secretary of State is flawed and worry about the potential for voters to be improperly cancelled from the voter rolls and possibly disenfranchised as a result,” Davis’ filing says.

Washington Monthly Editor Bill Scher recently deconstructed Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s (R-SD) explosion on the Senate floor last weekend as he labored to pin the shutdown of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) food benefits on Democrats.

“SNAP recipients shouldn’t go without food. People should be getting paid in this country. And we’ve tried to do that 13 times! You voted ‘no’ 13 times!” Thune said. “This isn’t a political game. These are real people’s lives that we’re talking about!”

But it was all performance, according to Scher.

“Look, it’s fair to tag Democrats for being the instigators of the government shutdown, but not for President Donald Trump’s decisions that maximize the shutdown’s pain and hurt people who do not need to be hurt,” Scher wrote. “Before the shutdown began almost a month ago, the Department of Agriculture, led by Secretary Brooke Rollins, made clear that the delivery of SNAP … need not be impacted.”

The details of that reality were "available here at this URL until at least October 10, according to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine," said Scher. Additionally, Thune blocked legislation by Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-NM) that would have funded SNAP benefits.

“But Trump’s USDA has memory-holed it,” Scher said, adding that when visitors now visit that URL, they get a Republican attack ad against Democrats that Scher said “almost surely” violates the Hatch Act.

“Senate Democrats have now voted 12 times to not fund the food stamp program, also known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Bottom line, the well has run dry. At this time, there will be no benefits issued November 01. We are approaching an inflection point for Senate Democrats. They can continue to hold out for healthcare for illegal aliens and gender mutilation procedures or reopen the government so mothers, babies, and the most vulnerable among us can receive critical nutrition assistance.”

But the truth is that SNAP has never been disrupted during past shutdowns, either during Republican or Democratic administrations, said Scher. They’ve always been provided by officials using available funding sources to prevent a break in benefits.

“Democrats shoulder no responsibility for Trump and Rollins cutting off SNAP benefits from those who need them to survive,” said Scher. “You can’t even argue Democrats should have expected SNAP to be affected because USDA declared ahead of the shutdown that it wouldn’t.”

Furthermore, the number of SNAP beneficiaries tops 40 million, “more than a tenth of the U.S. population,” said Scher. So, at least until very recently, the program enjoyed bipartisan support.

“Thune can save his performative rage for the people playing political games with people’s lives: Donald Trump and Agriculture Secretary Rollins,” Scher said.

Read the Washington Monthly report at this link.