Leak shows ICE 'bounty hunters' get kickbacks for handling 'alien children': report

The Trump administration has set aside tens of millions of dollars for police officers who help carry out its mass deportation policy, including incentive payments for processing “unaccompanied alien children,” newly leaked documents obtained by journalist Ken Klippenstein revealed Wednesday.

“An internal ICE financial ledger I obtained shows how the agency is turning local police departments across the county into a vast, decentralized immigration army,” Klippenstein wrote Wednesday on his Substack.

“This includes payments if cops sign up to be deputized, reimbursements for transportation, salary supplements for cops who process migrant children, and per-arrest-style incentive payments.”

Klippenstein also got his hands on an internal diagram from Immigration and Customs Enforcement that showed the process by which police officers can start receiving incentive payments for helping carry out the Trump administration’s immigration policy. According to the document, police officers become “operational” for the incentive program upon making their first immigration arrest.

Another leaked ICE document showed a list of categories for which police officers can receive incentive payments, among which are “time spent conducting immigration enforcement activities related to the location of [Unaccompanied Alien Children].”

Funding for the program is extensive, according to the leaked files, including $89 million alone for the Florida Highway Patrol, which “already has 1,803 ‘task force officers’ credentialed under the program,” the journalist wrote.

Funding for the program was also revealed to be allocated on a partisan basis.

“Absent from the list of bounty payments to states and localities are new payments to California, New Mexico, Illinois, Vermont, and Massachusetts as well as other ‘blue’ states,” Klippenstein wrote. “The reason? The money is being doled out to cooperative pro-Trump states and departments, affirming that these are political payoffs and hardly a pure national program.”