The Trump administration has quietly hired a team of scandal-plagued private debt collectors to hound immigrants slapped with new multimillion-dollar civil penalties for not leaving the country, according to documents reviewed by The Lever. All of the companies previously worked on a federal student loan debt-collection program shut down for widespread abuses.
One private collection notice obtained by The Lever assessed a $1.8 million fine on its recipient, the maximum penalty allowed under immigration law, plus another half a million in fees and interest charges, bringing the total to $2.3 million.
A collection notice sent by a private debt-collection agency regarding a $1.8 million Homeland Security fine, plus another half a million in fees and interest charges.That notice is not a one-off. According to immigration lawyers, there’s been a recent uptick in collection letters from private firms demanding immigrants pay multimillion-dollar fines, which the Department of Homeland Security began imposing last year.
As directed by a White House executive order from January, the Trump administration is using these massive new financial penalties to pressure immigrants to self-deport as part of its immigration crackdown. And to ensure immigrants ship out or pay up, the White House is enriching private contractors with a history of dubious practices, just like it has outsourced oversight of its detention centers to embattled for-profit companies like GeoGroup and CoreCivic.
“This is part and parcel with the administration’s desire to partner with the private sector to make immigration enforcement as punitive and painful as possible,” said Charles Moore, an attorney at Public Justice, a legal advocacy and defense group. “It’s very telling that they view the private market as the best way to accomplish that.”
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