Tiny firms that once chased down cheating spouses or missing relatives are now landing lucrative federal deals to help track undocumented immigrants. Under President Donald Trump, immigration enforcement has quietly opened the door to a new class of contractors, turning small private investigators and data brokers into key players in a national hunt for people the government wants to deport.
Instead of building this system solely through large, established security companies, the administration has scattered work across a mix of mom-and-pop outfits and prison-industry giants. The result is a fast-growing, lightly regulated marketplace where public power and private profit intersect, and where the people being tracked have little idea who is following them or how.
The quiet rise of Jan and Gravitas
At the center of this shift are firms that, until recently, had almost no footprint in federal law enforcement. One company, Jan, emerged from obscurity to win a contract to help search for undocumented immigrants, despite having limited experience with large government projects. Another, Gravitas, built its reputation on intensely personal assignments, such as tracking down a client’s biological father or helping someone catch a cheating partner, before pivoting into immigration work. Public records and online traces show that Gravitas had been focused on these much smaller jobs in YouTube videos and marketing materials before it was tapped for federal work, a leap that would be unusual in most other high-stakes national security arenas but is now part of the new immigration contracting landscape documented in small companies.
The scale of these awards is striking when set against the firms’ histories. Jan and Gravitas were not known as major federal vendors, yet they have been positioned to receive sizable payments for work that can directly affect whether someone is detained or deported. In one televised segment, an expert discussing Jan’s role in these contracts underscored the core dilemma: the government is outsourcing sensitive investigative work to companies whose track records are hard for the public to scrutinize. That concern is captured in a broadcast that asked how anyone can be sure that the companies getting paid will be responsible, and concluded bluntly, “we don’t,” a warning that appears in coverage of small businesses winning these deals.
From family searches to federal surveillance
The transformation of Gravitas illustrates how quickly the line between private detective work and federal surveillance can blur. In online clips, the company promoted its ability to find long-lost relatives and expose infidelity, a niche that depends on combing through public records, social media, and commercial databases. Those same skills, scaled up and paired with government data, can be repurposed to locate undocumented immigrants who have missed court dates or fallen off official contact lists. Reporting on Gravitas shows that its YouTube presence highlighted these intimate, small-dollar cases before it began pursuing immigration contracts, a pivot that is documented in investigations into Gravitas and similar firms.
Jan’s trajectory follows a comparable pattern, moving from modest investigative work into a role that now touches the federal deportation pipeline. The government’s willingness to entrust such companies with sensitive personal data raises questions about vetting, oversight, and accountability. In the same televised discussion that flagged Jan’s contract, the expert’s admission that “we don’t” know whether these firms will act responsibly was not a throwaway line, it was a recognition that the usual safeguards for law enforcement, such as clear training standards and public performance records, are far weaker when the work is pushed out to small private actors. That gap leaves immigrants, and the communities around them, exposed to decisions made in offices that may be little more than a laptop and a cellphone registered to a strip-mall suite.
Big money and bounty-style incentives
While some of the new players are tiny, the money at stake is anything but. A separate set of contracts has turned a group of ten companies into what critics describe as immigration bounty hunters, with each of those firms already making at least 1,000,000 dollars from their work for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. These companies stand to earn millions more in cash bonuses tied to how many immigrants they help locate, a structure that effectively pays them per person found. One of the firms, Fraud Inc., has been documented receiving payments as low as 15 dollars for individual leads, a figure that shows how granular and transactional the system has become, with each data point on a human life converted into a line item on a federal invoice, as detailed in an investigation into how companies have already substantial sums as ICE bounty hunters.
These bounty-style incentives are not limited to small firms. The private prison industry has also moved aggressively into the same space, using its experience managing detention centers to argue that it can help track people before they are locked up. BI Incorporated, a subsidiary of the for-profit prison company GEO Group, has been hired by ICE to pinpoint the locations of immigrants using a mix of electronic monitoring and data analysis. The arrangement, which runs through 2027, effectively turns BI Incorporated into a nationwide tracking contractor, paid to follow people who may never have been convicted of a crime. Reporting on how ICE hires immigrant bounty hunters from private prison company GEO Group describes BI Incorporated’s role in detail, showing how a firm best known for ankle monitors and detention facilities is now embedded in the broader surveillance web, a shift captured in coverage of how ICE hires immigrant bounty.
GEO Group’s $121 million skip-tracing machine
The most dramatic example of this expansion is a 121,000,000 dollar contract that ICE has awarded to a GEO Group subsidiary for what officials describe as “skip tracing,” the industry term for tracking down people who have gone off the radar. The deal is designed to supercharge surveillance of immigrants by combining commercial databases, phone records, and other digital traces into a system that can quickly generate leads on where someone might be living or working. Financial incentives built into the contract are expected to turn the contractors into de facto bounty hunters, rewarding them for each successful locate and creating pressure to squeeze as much information as possible out of every available data source, as detailed in reporting on how ICE taps a GEO Group unit in a 121 million deal.
That same GEO Group network already runs detention centers, including facilities such as Delaney Hall in Newark, which means the company can now profit at multiple stages of the enforcement process, from locating immigrants to holding them in custody. The skip-tracing contract effectively knits together the front end and back end of the deportation pipeline under a single corporate umbrella. For immigrants, that consolidation means that the same private actors who might one day control their physical confinement are also involved in the digital hunt that brings them into custody in the first place, a concentration of power that would be controversial in any other area of law enforcement but has advanced rapidly in immigration with little public debate.
Open-ended contracts and a shifting deportation machine
Behind these individual deals sits a broader policy choice by the Trump administration to lean heavily on private companies in its deportation push. The administration has offered open-ended contracts to 13 private companies to help verify where suspected undocumented immigrants are living, a structure that allows the work to expand without clear caps on cost or scope. In one widely shared account, undercover FBI agents posing as private contractors recorded a conversation that highlighted how profit motives and enforcement goals can intertwine, a moment that critics seized on with the hashtag “#ProfitsOverPeople” to argue that the system is being built around revenue as much as public safety. The existence of those 13 open-ended deals, and the undercover recording, is described in a public post detailing how Trump administration has to a roster of private firms.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
Grant Mercer covers market dynamics, business trends, and the economic forces driving growth across industries. His analysis connects macro movements with real-world implications for investors, entrepreneurs, and professionals. Through his work at The Daily Overview, Grant helps readers understand how markets function and where opportunities may emerge.
