The Going Rate
Immigration enforcement now comes with a price list — bonuses, fees, nightly rates — and new federal money is multiplying it. The only line the checkbook can't cross is a state's own law.
In January a congressman from Illinois, Raja Krishnamoorthi, introduced a bill whose title does most of the talking: the No Private Bounty Hunters for Immigration Enforcement Act. Congress does not write a name like that for something hypothetical. Weeks earlier, reporters had identified the first ten private firms hired by the federal immigration agency to locate people — the trade is called skip tracing — working from batches of ten thousand names, using database searches, surveillance, and social-media monitoring, under what the agency’s own procurement documents describe as an “incentive based pricing structure”: bonuses for finding people quickly and accurately. The list of firms has since grown to fourteen, and the contracts could reach a billion dollars through 2027, with as many as a million and a half people to find. The bill to stop it has three cosponsors and has not moved out of committee.
That contract is one line in what has quietly become a schedule of prices — what the federal government will pay whoever helps it enforce immigration law. The rest of it is worth reading slowly.
What the ledger says
The local officer has a line. A ledger from inside the agency, released in March by the journalist Ken Klippenstein and analyzed by the research and advocacy group FWD.us, records some $257 million paid or promised to 282 state and local law enforcement agencies that signed their officers into federal immigration work. The payments scale with results — quarterly bonuses run as high as $1,000 per officer, tied to the share of the people the agency names who are successfully found — and at some departments the recorded payments already top $40,000 per officer. Based on the sign-ups and the funding already promised, the same researchers estimate the flow to local law enforcement could reach $1.4 to $2 billion a year.
The county jail has a line too — a nightly rate, negotiated door by door. Clinton County, Pennsylvania bills $82 for each person held for the federal government each day; Pike County bills $120. Five Pennsylvania counties together billed more than $21 million across 2024 and 2025, and Pike County alone earned over $16 million. “The county has relied upon this additional revenue for decades,” Pike County Commissioner Christa Caceres said, and her colleague in Cambria County, Scott Hunt, expected the arrangement to continue.
And when the arithmetic runs the other way, so does the cooperation. Orange County, Florida added up its actual cost of holding a person — $180.09 a day, against an $88 reimbursement — and in April its commissioners voted unanimously to end the detention portion of their agreement. The federal government came back with $95, then $125. The county still said no. Duty does not usually come with a counteroffer.
The money is about to grow
Last month the Justice Department opened applications for a new $3 billion reimbursement fund for states, counties, and cities — money for hiring officers, buying equipment, building temporary detention space, and what the statute calls locating and apprehending people who have committed a crime “in addition to being unlawfully present.” The first application round closes July 15; the first grant periods begin August 1.
Two terms in the rules are worth reading twice. To apply at all, an agency must already have officers deputized into federal immigration work, or commit in writing to signing them up. And any activity that impedes federal enforcement — including declining to share information or to give federal agents access — is out of scope, with compliance certified under penalty of perjury. A separate $10 billion fund reimburses state and local border-security spending, and the homeland-security grant program that funds border-corridor policing lists overtime for deputized officers among the projects it pays for. The money is aimed, by design, at the places with the fewest limits written down.
The line that is not for sale
Because there is one. A bonus needs an officer who is allowed to earn it. A nightly rate needs a jail that is allowed to bill it. In the states that have barred their police and their jails from this work in law, the price list has no takers — not because a thousand departments each found the will to refuse, but because the state answered the question once, in advance, for all of them. Everywhere else the question is being answered the other way, department by department, budget cycle by budget cycle, at the going rate.
What you can do
Look up your own state. See whether the law where you live lets your police be paid into federal immigration work and your county bill for the beds — or whether your state answered the question in writing before the money arrived. Then tell the people who represent you which it should be.
Check your state: www.FederalLimits.org/federal
Reach your representatives in a minute: https://FederalLimits.org/#take-action
Congress may yet pass the bill with the plain-spoken name. Your state does not have to wait for it.
— Federal Limits
Federal Limits is a nonpartisan 501(c)(4) nonprofit tracking the legal limits on federal authority — the due-process protections that apply to every American — across all 50 states, DC, and Puerto Rico. Our methodology, our sources, and every state’s full scorecard are public. This work is funded by people who believe those limits are worth defending. If that’s you, help keep it going at www.FederalLimits.org/support.