Trump Is Siccing Shady Private Debt Collectors on Immigrants

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.

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 [of] 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."

As of last year, the administration had slapped hefty fines totaling an estimated $6 billion on over 20,000 immigrants for various infractions. The bulk of those penalties relate to overstaying a deportation removal order, for which immigrants are now being fined nearly $1,000 a day for up to five years.

Now Homeland Security is outsourcing the management of that debt to the private collection industry, which has faced mountains of lawsuits and consumer complaints over exploitative practices such as harassing consumers who are late on credit card bills, medical payments, or auto loans.

At least four private companies inked debt collection deals with Homeland Security as the agency began ramping up civil penalties on immigrants, according to procurement records. That included Continental Services, one of the largest collection agencies nationwide, which signed three purchasing agreements with Homeland Security last September worth a combined $1 million. A fifth company is doing debt collection work for Homeland Security through a contract with the Treasury Department, which manages the account where payments for these fines are deposited.

There's been a recent uptick in collection letters from private firms demanding immigrants pay multimillion-dollar fines.

All of these private agencies were previously part of a federal student loan debt collection program plagued by alleged misconduct. That program was eventually shut down by Joe Biden's administration due to widespread operational problems, massive fees on borrowers, and cost overruns for taxpayers.

Now that same group of debt collectors has been rewarded with new Homeland Security contracts — which have fewer guardrails in place to protect debtors.

"If you're [Homeland Security Advisor] Stephen Miller, you want the worst debt collector in America to be as aggressive and harassing as possible, because the goal is to make people miserable to get them out of the country," said Mike Pierce, the executive director of Protect Borrowers, a legal advocacy group for consumer rights, who previously worked on student borrowing issues at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).

Homeland Security and the debt collection agencies did not respond to a request for comment.

Around March 2025, the Trump administration began levying large penalties on immigrants by relying on an obscure provision from a 1996 immigration law signed by President Bill Clinton. The statute allows the government to fine undocumented immigrants for willfully failing to depart the country — but it had never been enforced until President Donald Trump first took office.

Around 2018, after Congress blocked the total funding requested by the Trump administration to build a wall along the country's southern border, then White House adviser Stephen Miller devised an alternative strategy. The administration would finance the wall by leveraging its civil penalty authority to raise funds on the backs of immigrants, according to leaked emails obtained by the government watchdog group American Oversight.

Once collected, those fines would be held in an "immigration enforcement account" administered by the US Treasury that could then be tapped by Homeland Security as a de facto slush fund for enforcement initiatives of its choosing.

While the penalty program remained fairly limited during Trump's first administration, it has ramped up considerably under his second term. By August of last year, over 20,000 people had been slapped with new fines.

Homeland Security recently expanded the scope of these penalties, including instituting a new $5,000 fine for illegal border crossings, as authorized by the One Big Beautiful Bill. But the most common fines target immigrants for overstaying deportation removal orders issued by immigration judges.

The government is now fining immigrants nearly $1,000 for every day they overstay a deportation order, even if those court orders were issued years ago.

The statute of limitations for such a penalty is five years, meaning the maximum fine Homeland Security can levy is $1.8 million. For many immigrants, that's an insurmountable amount of debt, and it can't be waived unless they leave the country.

The government is now fining immigrants nearly $1,000 for every day they overstay a deportation order, even if those court orders were issued years ago.

The department also instituted new rules "streamlin[ing] the process for fining illegal aliens," which entailed gutting the administrative hearings where they could previously protest a fine. Now immigrants are merely entitled to written notice from the government in response to their petitions.

The rules also reduce the number of days' notice Homeland Security must give immigrants before beginning to collect such fines, so they can contest the matter. That number is now fifteen days, down from thirty.

According to a lawsuit filed by a collection of immigration lawyers last year, Homeland Security may be enforcing this new penalty program illegally by targeting immigrants who have other legal avenues to remain in the country. The suit argues that the government has failed to demonstrate that many of these fines' recipients were willfully defying deportation removal orders, per the statute.

According to the suit, in some instances, immigrants have secured permission from immigration authorities to temporarily remain in the country, but they still faced heavy fines. In other cases, immigrants received fines despite being in the process of contesting their deportation orders and pursuing other legal avenues to remain in the country, such as applying for temporary visas that may still be available to them.

"The entire process is a total sham," said Moore, the attorney at Public Justice.

These ongoing legal challenges haven't discouraged Homeland Security, which is now working with the Justice Department to file lawsuits against immigrants who haven't paid their million-dollar fines. With a court order, the government can begin garnishing wages and seizing assets if payments aren't made.

"We've heard of people who weren't even notified of the fine before getting served a lawsuit by the government," said Nicollete Glazer, an immigration lawyer based in Los Angeles. "There's a lot of bad practices taking place."

In addition to bringing legal action against immigrants who haven't paid their fines, Homeland Security is also using its massive new $190 billion immigration enforcement budget to award lucrative contracts to private contractors to collect this debt on the agency's behalf.

Immigration lawyers say they used to only see debt notices coming directly from the government; now they've noticed an increase in notices sent by a host of private debt collectors. From June to September of last year, the department inked procurement deals with Continental Services and four other debt agencies. That included a major collector, FH Cann Associates, which was awarded a contract valued at nearly $700,000. Coast Professional Inc., Central Portfolio Control Inc., and Pioneer Credit Recovery were also tapped by Homeland Security.

According to immigration lawyers, most of the collection papers they've seen from private contractors are for fines in the millions of dollars, accompanied by sky-high fees.

In itemized payment sheets sent by private collectors and reviewed by the Lever, such "administrative fees" make up the bulk of the financial markups, sometimes totaling $500,000 in charges for an $1.8 million fine. Language from the notices inform its recipients that authorized private collectors may collect fees as well as charge interest at an unspecified rate.

"Additional interest, penalties, and administrative costs will also continue to accrue from the date of the initial CBP-issued invoice," reads one notice sent by Customs and Border Protection, the division of Homeland Security that administers these fines.

It's unclear whether these fees and interest charges line the contractors' pockets or are transferred back to the government's immigration enforcement account.

Based on the procurement records reviewed by the Lever, the private debt contractors are paid for their debt collection services, regardless of whether they recover the fine.

All of the debt collection firms now working under contract for Homeland Security formerly held contracts with the Department of Education to collect money from students who defaulted on government-guaranteed loans to pay for college.

The 2010 Federal Direct Loan Program created government-backed student loans, whose debt servicing was then outsourced to private firms. That public-private partnership was eventually expanded under the Obama administration to include thirty contractors. But the program quickly became a political and legal debacle, one that didn't fade even after the Obama administration tried implementing reforms to cap exorbitantly high fees charged by student debt collectors.

In 2017, the CFPB issued a scathing report finding endemic problems with the Education Department's debt collection privatization effort, including that contractors were profiting immensely from the program despite not delivering results.

For example, investigators found that the companies' collection cost fees totaled as much as 25 percent of students' loan balances, even though those fees didn't reflect the firms' actual costs of collecting such payments. In total, the CFPB found that the government was reimbursing these firms $40 for every $1 they recovered from students.

It's unclear whether these fees and interest charges line the contractors' pockets or are transferred back to the government's immigration enforcement account.

The report led to a Senate inquiry that concluded the program was fueling a punitive, wasteful, and self-defeating debt cycle.

In a letter to the Education Department, a group of senators wrote that the "departmental process provides perverse financial incentives for private collection agencies to aggressively pursue borrowers . . . and encourages distressed borrowers to use less successful tools to help them deal with default."

In 2021, the Biden administration shut down the private sector student debt collection effort entirely. But now, some of the same contractors involved in the Education Department program have been reemployed to collect debts for Homeland Security.

Most prominently, in 2017, the Obama administration sued Navient, then an Education Department loan servicing contractor, and its subsidiary, Pioneer Credit Recovery, for failing to inform students about debt relief options before demanding payments, among other questionable practices.

In 2024, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau finalized a $120 million settlement in the matter banning Navient from all federal student loan servicing and putting Pioneer under the supervision of the chief consumer regulatory agency.

Now Pioneer, which was spun off from Navient in 2025, appears to have been tapped to work on behalf of Homeland Security's new financial penalty effort. The firm has sent collection letters for Homeland Security fines, according to immigration lawyers, as part of an ongoing contract it has with the Treasury Department.

Alongside Pioneer, Continental Services, FH Cann Associates, Coast Professional Inc., and Central Portfolio Control Inc. were all part of the Education Department's debt collection privatization effort before being recently tapped directly by Homeland Security. Central Portfolio Control was a subcontractor of another debt agency, Professional Bureau of Collections of Maryland, which had secured a $13 million contract from the Education Department.

According to immigration lawyers and debt protection lawyers, the overlap may be by design.

"This kind of operation is going to be a perfect fit for [Homeland Security], which will tell [private contractors there are] no rules or accountability," said Glazer, the Los Angeles immigration lawyer. "And with the government guaranteeing pay, it's a major revenue source for these collectors, even if they don't end up collecting debt."

According to Glazer, private collectors' automated technology systems can churn out text messages, emails, letters, and phone calls at a vast scale to hound debtors for payments. That could be a major boon for Homeland Security, given the massive number of fines it has levied.

And now, the rapacious practices once deployed on student borrowers may be unleashed on immigrants who have even fewer legal protections.

"We're seeing financial distress weaponized all across this administration to manipulate people's behavior, especially now with immigration," said Pierce at Protect Borrowers.