ICE plans cash rewards for private bounty hunters to locate and track immigrants | Hacker News Reader

ICE plans cash rewards for private bounty hunters to locate and track immigrants

theintercept.com

44 pointsclanky35 comments

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https://archive.ph/2025.11.01-213415/https://theintercept.co...

Why is this unacceptable for immigration enforcement but acceptable for even petty criminals?

Define acceptable.

I don't understand. What are you refering to?

> What are you refering to?

Normal bounty hunters. I’m asking why this feels different. (Civil v criminal doesn’t seem to be meaningful. Maybe it’s the bond?)

Is there such a thing as "normal bounty hunter hunting petty criminals"? I have doubts about "normal bounty hunter" even without "petty criminal" part added to it.

Heck, they even make TV shows about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_the_Bounty_Hunter !

They also have a tv show dedicated to selling off storage units that are unpaid, but my friend whose family owns a large chain of storage units has told me that it’s basically fake. (He said usually the unpaid units are filled with something worthless and on the off chance they’re not, it’s donated to charity)

So now I question all these shows a bit.

Does that still happen. I thought that was only in cowboy films.

The US is surprisingly archaic. It’s a thing in some places.

There are innocent people and others for whom being hunted is a disproportionate response, and that shouldn't be acceptable either. You just may not see it because you think it will never affect you, only people who can be handwaved as beneath you.

The slope is slippery?

The disproportionate application of force is the issue.

My understanding is that bounty hunters are generally sent after people who fail to appear for their court dates or prison sentences? This would be more akin to "Walmart got a shoplifter on video and the local sheriff sent a bounty hunter after them."

The use of mass surveillance Palantir dragnet data in this case is also unique, and a precursor/practice for using it in domestic counterinsurgency and war on the broader populace.

A LOT of money is about to be redirected into the GOP/Trump/Maga private military.

Palantir stock price and federal contract movement are already performing well.

The trick is to figure out how to grift the grifters.

Then what? You've got yourself a nice nest egg to spend in a prison state?

> Then what?

Then you use the profuse records these folks leave in their wake to back through to everyone who profited from or otherwise aided and abetted this Gestapo. Down to the individual agents and “forward deployed” engineers.

(To be clear, I support stricter immigration enforcement. ICE blowing the military budget of Saudi Arabia to deport fewer than Obama did with a tenth of a budget isn’t immigration enforcement, it’s a partisan militia. I don’t use the term Gestapo lightly.)

So now, if you don't like someone, you can ICE them instead of SWATting them. Great.

Everything old is new again. Never again is now.

Even if I was a citizen or legal immigrant, I would just leave at this point. First they came for the communists...

(Yes I know a lot of people can't leave. Maybe the US needs to do a Nepal and overthrow this corrupt government)

> Maybe the US needs to do a Nepal and overthrow this corrupt government

What do you think the current crop want? In any new revolution, the rich consolidate power. Same as has happened in pretty much every non-communist popular revolution over the last two centuries.

... you are mentioning the solution yourself.

What is needed is a communist popular revolution, it's the only hope left for the country.

Revolutions rarely change the underlying social and economic structures in their host nations. The paths that wealth and power travel are too well groomed for their inheritors to ignore.

The US is possibly too free now to have a proper revolution. A key requisite for a revolution to be successful is that the population just accepts the new leaders. I think it’s a coin flip now if that requisite is met. Of course the alternative isn’t peaceful either, but more like a civil war or at least factions going after each other.

This is why even flawed democracy is better. The alternatives are just horrible.

> What is needed is a communist popular revolution, it's the only hope left for the country

Communist popular revolutions succeeded in replacing the previous elites. None of them—apart from departure from Tsarist mismanagement, and even then only for a short run—resulted in a higher quality of life for the people.

History rarely has justice. Idiots overthrowing flawed democracies reaping and then getting stomped on by the ensuing autocrats are a rare example. (The others are terrorism and strategic bombing backfiring. Pretty much always.)

> Communist popular revolutions succeeded in replacing the previous elites. None of them resulted in a higher quality of life for the people.

Utterly and demonstrably false.

> Utterly and demonstrably false

Fair enough, I added the exception that’s known. If someone thinks there is Tsarist-level economic mismanagement in America to be reaped by a new regime, I have a DOGE to sell them.

China and Cuba were also both unquestionably improvements over the status quo. The neoliberal turn in Russia in the 1990s, meanwhile, was an unmitigated humanitarian disaster, and the removal of the USSR as an alternative on the world stage unshackled Western capital to the current relentless pursuit of advantage that has yielded today's K-shaped economy and all the instability, misery, and scapegoating of powerless groups like migrants that has come with it.

> China and Cuba were also both unquestionably improvements over the status quo

Fair enough. I'd point out that both had low baselines, and the former managed to still fuck that up under Mao. China's living standards dropped post Revolution, and didn't really start materially improving until its leaders had swapped away from communism. By that point, they proceeded to fabulously enrich themselves.

> neoliberal turn in Russia in the 1990s, meanwhile, was an unmitigated humanitarian disaster

Agree.

> unshackled Western capital to the current relentless pursuit of advantage that has yielded today's K-shaped economy

This was happening since at least the 1980s.

> None of them resulted in a higher quality of life for the people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_literacy_campaign

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-35073966

https://www.plenglish.com/news/2025/10/14/cubas-urban-reform...

And this is just in Cuba alone. Imagine what would've been possible without the blockade! Don't believe the propaganda you've been fed.

> this is just in Cuba alone

Cuban literacy is a legitimate example. The other would be Russia. Beyond those two, you're stuck trying to justify the Cultural Revolution.

Most revolutions result in the old guard consolidating power. Where they haven't, they've tended to cause unmitigated misery. In the rare cases where violent revolution didn't fuck over everyone but the rich, it was because the previous aristocracy left a lot of develoment cards on the table. And in none of those situations was a system even pretending to hold elections overthrown. (Yes, I'm moving the goal posts. I concede the previous absolutist position was untenable. I think this refined one is, and my original point, about anyone arguing for revolution in America being an idiot, stands.)

> Don't believe the propaganda you've been fed

This is a terrible way to end if you're arguing in good faith.

> In the rare cases where violent revolution didn't fuck over everyone but the rich, it was because the previous aristocracy left a lot of develoment cards on the table.

I'd argue this is generally why revolutions happen in the first place, because the masses are miserable while the aristocracy lives a life of excess.

Exhibit B: https://old.reddit.com/r/Fauxmoi/comments/1omlsyg/trumps_ela...

I'd further argue that there's plenty of "development cards", as you call them, left on the table in the US. Medical care being paywalled is an obvious one. Homelessness is at a historic high [0]. 13.5% of households are food insecure [1].

All of those problems could be fixed by simply redistributing resources from a few oligarchs.

I'm not sure what to make of your point about voting - I'm not quite sure I understand how that's related to the success of a post-revolution society.

> This is a terrible way to end if you're arguing in good faith.

So is calling people that disagree with you idiot, but I am actually enjoying the discussion, so lets not get petty here.

My point was a bigger one about Cuban society having these achievements despite being constantly undermined by its superpower neighbor. The same neighbor that presumably educated you? It was an attempt to point out a conflict of interest in said education system, not meant to be a personal attack.

[0] https://bipartisanpolicy.org/blog/homelessness-at-a-record-h... [1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...

someone better get on a private bounty hunter job portal and sell it back to the government to make some real money on each cash reward.

Or crowdfunded hire a bounty hunter to hunt the bounty hunter network /s

Our society is so damn dystopian now sheesh

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