Trump team plots to keep terrorizing people after they’re deported
Using the infinite amount of cash at its disposal, Customs and Border Patrol has come up with one of the most morally repugnant options for a government contract imaginable: hunting down people who’ve been deported and demanding they pay civil immigration fines.
Yes, if you happen to be familiar with someone who is an especially horrifyingly scummy version of a skip tracer or bounty hunter, you can let them know they only have until Friday to respond to this terrific opportunity to go to Mexico, Honduras, or Guatemala to collect these fines.
Imagine deciding that the thing you should do with your one wild and precious life is to continue to terrorize immigrants who have already been terrorized out of the country.
The Trump administration hopes to track down some of the 66,387 deportees who ostensibly owe $423 million to the United States. These aren’t fines attached to any criminal act or consequence. Instead, they apply to anyone who stays after a deportation order has been issued or after signing a voluntary departure agreement.
And they run a comical, unattainable $998 per day.
Per Project Salt Box, CBP already pays three private collection agencies for this sort of thing. In fact, the Department of Homeland Security already ponied up more than $118 million for skip-tracing services, but neither the private companies nor CBP has managed to locate an alleged debtor outside of U.S. borders.
Since neither those agencies nor CBP have anyone working abroad to torment immigrants after they leave the United States, the administration has set out to remedy that—because it is staffed entirely with monsters.
The contract is supposed to begin on Aug. 14 and last for two years, because all government contracts basically now handily terminate before the 2028 election.
It isn’t at all clear how, exactly, this would work even if the world’s worst people take on this contract, in no small part because these fines can only be paid through the U.S. government portal at pay.gov.
Can’t wait to find out the plan for somehow having random debt collectors demanding people in other countries install the administration’s crappy app to pay a staggering civil fine to a country from which they were forcibly removed.
This latest moral horror joins the $180 million the government set aside to pay private bounty hunters to track down immigrants when there apparently weren’t enough masked federal agents doing it.
And then there’s the $10 million to buy immigrants’ tax identification numbers from a data broker, penalizing them for having duly paid their taxes even if they are undocumented.
And, of course, the $125 million to Thomson Reuters to get everyone’s credit card data—no warrants needed—which we’re currently pretending is somehow about combating voter fraud.
And can’t forget about the millions and millions to Palantir, which is all in on deporting people, for an app to find neighborhoods with the most sitting ducks for immigration thugs to terrorize.
It’s an impossible, immoral thing this country is doing, and the shame should stay with us long after we finally get rid of Trump.
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