bounty hunter

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MERRI OK

SEE DEBT COLLECTOR REPO

PVT EXTRACTION

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5 26 lever Trump’s Private Repo Men Are Hunting Immigrants

theTrump 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.

IFrame ContentA 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.”

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.

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 the Biden 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 Adviser] 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.

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

“A Total Sham”

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 advisor 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.

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Once collected, those fines would be held in an “immigration enforcement account” administered by the U.S. 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 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 15 days, down from 30.

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.”

Weaponizing Financial Distress

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.

A Customs and Border Protection notice informing people that authorized private debt collectors may collect fees and charge interest on the Homeland Security fines.

“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.

A History Of Abuse

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 30 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, a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau 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 Consumer Financial Protection Bureau found that the government was reimbursing these firms $40 for every $1 they recovered from students.

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.

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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’s 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.

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5 26 lever Trump’s Private Repo Men Are Hunting Immigrants

IFrame ContentA 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.

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

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

“A Total Sham”

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

Weaponizing Financial Distress

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.

A Customs and Border Protection notice informing people that authorized private debt collectors may collect fees and charge interest on the Homeland Security 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.

A History Of Abuse

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

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

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.

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MMA 4 26

A group of Trump allies have formed the Mass Deportation Coalition to encourage the administration not to back away from its deportation push. The coalition — which includes the Oversight Project’s Mike Howell, former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince, former Customs and Border Protection Acting Commissioner Mark Morgan, and conservative groups including The Heritage Foundation — released a playbook urging the White House to continue raiding work sites and deporting migrant workers despite pushback from voters. Politico, [4/1/26]

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JACOBIN LEVER NOV?

IN February, at the start of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, news broke that a group of military contractors was circulating a blueprint for mass deportations, to be carried out by private contractors.

Led by Erik Prince, Donald Trump ally and founder of the notorious mercenary firm Blackwater, the group proposed (among other ideas) that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) create a “skip tracing team” that would send out private contractors to hunt down immigrants targeted for deportation, per reporting at the time by Politico.

Now, there are indications ICE is carrying out those plans.

Last month, the Lever revealed that ICE had signed a $7 million contract with defense contractor SOS International for “skip tracing services.” SOS International, also known as SOSi, has long done business with the federal government, including working with the US military in Afghanistan — and has business ties to one of the military contractors whose name was listed alongside Prince’s in the proposal.

It was the first time, per online federal procurement databases, that an ICE contract description contained the phrase “skip tracing,” a term usually associated with debt collection and bounty hunting. There was little further detail about the services SOSi would provide to Trump’s immigration enforcers.

The contract — with its eerie callback to the Prince deportation blueprint — appears not to be a fluke. Several days later, ICE signed another “skip tracing” contract, this time worth up to $33.5 million, with international debt collector Global Recovery Group LLC.

Then, on Friday, October 31, as the Intercept first reported, ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations bureau, the agency’s primary deportation arm, released procurement documents that mapped out new plans to create a bounty-hunting program that would deploy skip tracing methods. Though the documents are preliminary, ICE’s proposed program hews closely to the blueprint drawn up in February by Prince and his cadre of military contractors.

Under the program, private contractors will deploy “all technology systems available” to locate ICE’s targets, the documents say. Contractors would be given a list of ten thousand names at a time and be allowed to ultimately locate “up to 1,000,000” individuals, per the records.

ICE already has plenty of technology at its disposal to identify and track down immigrants, an arsenal that the agency is furtherbuilding out now that it is flush with cash. But the “skip tracing team” appears distinct in that its mandate would include sending out privately contracted bounty hunters to systematically identify immigrants’ residences and workplaces.

The bounty hunting program would include “performance-based incentives” — cash bonuses for vendors who successfully hunt down immigrants for ICE. This cash payout idea appears to be pulled directly from the Prince memo, which suggested that ICE build out a “bounty program which provides a cash reward for each illegal alien held by a state or local law enforcement officer.”

To judge from ICE’s first skip tracing contracts with SOSi and Global Recovery Group LLC, which are together worth over $40 million, the program will prove yet another gold mine for the military contractors clamoring for their cut of the Trump administration’s multibillion-dollar immigration spending blitz. And that makes sense: it was drafted by those same vendors.

From Blackwater to Bounty Hunting

The core message of Prince’s deportation plan was this: If President Donald Trump wanted to carry out his stated goals of mass deportations, he couldn’t do so alone. “The government,” the plan said, “should enlist outside assistance.”

Although Politico did not publish the complete text of the proposal, what has been made public from the document indicates that Prince was making the suggestion as part of the “special entity” 2USV, a group of defense contractors. (An LLC with the same name has been registered in Wyoming, but many details about the project remain unclear.)

The contractors include former Blackwater employees like Bill Mathews, the company’s former vice president, who pleaded guilty to violating firearms records law related to his work at the mercenary firm, as well as Richard Pere, former head of a Blackwater aviation subsidiary. Most of the Blackwater alumni have not been formally associated with the company in years. Blackwater has gone through a series of acquisitions and name changes since Prince sold the firm in 2010; its latest form is the private security conglomerate Constellis, which still operates the flagship Blackwater training center in North Carolina and is now trying to “drive strategic growth” in its border-operations work.

So far, there are no clear ties between Prince’s current business ventures — including Vectus Global, a murky security firm that is sending drones and mercenaries to the Haitian government — and the vendors now inking deals to carry out ICE’s new bounty-hunting program. But at least one other contractor involved in the initial proposal has business ties to the companies that have been tapped to carry out the plans.

Louis Gobern, one of the names listed in the initial Prince memo, is currently the president of Resilient Logistics Services & Solutions, a defense contractor that advertises its work with the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense. The company names SOS International, ICE’s new skip tracing contractor, as an “industry partner,” and both companies have previously worked as subcontractors on the same Customs and Border Protection contract.

SOS International has been vying for Department of Homeland Security contracts in recent months, poaching one of ICE’s top intelligence chiefs, Andre Watson, in August. The company boasted that Watson, who helped run the ICE program targeting students for political speech, would help the contractor “expand its business and deliver capabilities to the federal and state law enforcement agencies.”

When Politico contacted Mathews, one of the former Blackwater executives, about the proposal in February, he claimed he had heard nothing from the Trump administration about moving forward with the bounty hunter program.

“There has been zero show of interest or engagement from the government, and we have no reason to believe there will be,” he said.

If ICE’s recent multimillion-dollar spending spree is any indication, that is changing.

This article was first published by the Lever, an award-winning independent investigative newsroom.

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no lnx

mAGA's up and coming 'shock jock' is really a bounty hunter with a disturbing past

Meaghan Ellis November 05, 2021

One Make America Great Again (MAGA) shock jock is creating a name for himself as a controversial right-wing commentator who has repeatedly gone against the grain. However, his new-found stardom follows years of turbulent run-ins with the law.

According to The Daily Beast, Stew Peters isn't the typical right-wing personality because no one is safe. In fact, Peters' recent interview with Vernon Jones —a former Democrat now running as a Republican gubernatorial candidate in Georgia gubernatorial candidate— went completely off the rails.

While Jones, who has reportedly been endorsed by former President Donald Trump, may have assumed he'd be doing a softball right-leaning interview, he quickly realized that wasn't the case.

Peters wasted no time questioning Jones about a 2010 discrimination case where he was accused of discriminating against white employees during his time as the Dekalb County commissioner, the intense discussion quickly led to a clash between the two men. As Jones tried to verbally defend himself, Peters muted him to get his point across.

"That's what bullies do," Peters said to his audience. "They gaslight, shout you down, lie incessantly, to avoid the light of truth from being shined on their dark corruption."

Shortly after Peters' remarks, Jones abruptly ended the call. The incriminating interview led to a bit of blowback and the loss of multiple endorsements for Jones. However, the gubernatorial candidate isn't the only person facing backlash for his past.The Beast reports that Peters' past is also rather tainted. From theft accusations and charges to domestic-related issues and botched bounty hunting, Peters has had his own share of run-ins with the law.

Back in February, Peters' wife called the police amid his drunken rage when he "allegedly started to berate her and thrown household items, including boots and pillows, at her."

The Beast also detailed the report about Peters' actions.

"Arriving on the scene, police officers found Peters, who appeared to be intoxicated. His wife showed officers video she had recorded of her husband yelling at her and throwing objects at her, according to the report. Asked whether she was concerned Peters would attack her, she said, "That's the reason that I had to call you guys," and nodded yes."

As a result of the incident with his wife, Peters was charged with a series of misdemeanors including "domestic assault, assault, and disorderly conduct."

Peters bizarre bounty hunting job has also led to a series of problems for him. In 2015, his "police-like uniforms" led to changes in Minnesota's laws. Now, bounty hunters are no longer allowed to wear uniforms that resemble that of law enforcement officers.

Per The Beast:

"Peters's bounty hunting turned tragic in 2017, when Peters tried to catch a fugitive who had absconded to Texas. At a Texas car dealership, two bounty hunters working for Peters located the suspect, who was wanted on charges of DUI, assaulting a police officer, and possession of cocaine. As they attempted to detain the man, he pulled a gun, prompting a shootout in a dealership crowded with customers and employees."

The disturbing incident ended with the suspect and the two bounty hunters being fatally wounded. The dealership also claimed Peters and his hunters had "falsely identified themselves as federal agents."

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https://theintercept.com/2019/08/18/gun-violence-bounty-hunters/

today I LIVE in Brooklyn, but I didn’t grow up in New York. I’m country. I grew up in a small Kentucky town and was a part of a church that taught us a verse from the Bible that says “the love of money is the root of all evil.” For my whole life, even as my faith has struggled, I’ve held on to that verse and have believed that wherever we find evil, we’ll always find a money trail somewhere nearby.

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And I have long since believed that profit, jobs, and wealth are at the center of the explosive growth of America’s mass incarceration crisis – and not just with jails, prisons, and police, but with the offshoot industries that survive and thrive on the back of our crooked legal system. One of these crooked industries involves bounty hunters, and there’s been an incredible injustice with a group of them killing an innocent man in Tennessee and avoiding any real punishment for it.

Jalen Johnson Milan was a beloved 24-year-old father of three young children in Clarksville, Tennessee, about an hour north of Nashville. Two years ago, on a spring evening in April of 2017, Jalen and some buddies, including his cousin, Jaden Hogan, who was driving, took a trip to the local Walmart where they ended up parking next to a car that had a drug informant inside named Kirsten Mahon.

When I say “drug informant,” am I right that your first assumption is that this is about to be a story on a police sting gone awry? You’d think so, but this was something altogether different.

According to surveillance video from the Walmart, within seconds of pulling into that parking spot, their car was surrounded by seven men who frantically yelled from every side, telling Jalen and his friends to get out of their car. The seven men had guns drawn. One of the men who surrounded the vehicle smashed open a window. Freaking out, Jaden Hogan, the driver, backed out of the parking spot, and then mashed the gas to the floor, so that he could get them all away from these men with guns.

They didn’t know if it was a gang, robbers, or police surrounding them, but it was clear their lives were in danger. Put yourself in that position, and imagine your car being surrounded by seven rough-looking dudes with guns drawn who did not identify themselves as police. What would you do?

[Booking photos released by the Clarksville Police Department shows, top row from left, William L. Byles, Kenneth Chiasson, Antwon D. Keesee, and Jonathan Schnepp; bottom row from left, Roger D. West Jr., Prentice L. Williams, and Joshua Young, on April 23, 2017.

Image: Clarksville Police Department via AP

When Jaden sped away, two of the seven men who surrounded the car, Joshua Young and Roger West Jr., unloaded their guns, firing shot after shot. Jaden, the driver, was hit in the neck, and Jalen was mortally wounded, with a bullet ripping through his heart and lungs. Investigators later tested every bullet at the scene and determined that they all appeared to have been fired by Young and West, according to reporting by The Leaf Chronicle, a newspaper in Clarksville that has provided consistent coverage of the case.

Those seven men got into their car, and for nearly seven miles they chased their prey through Clarksville. Jaden Hogan, the wounded driver, frantically called 911 from the parking lot before the chase was even fully underway, telling the operator that they had been surrounded and shot by a group of men, and that they were fleeing for their lives, speeding down a local road. But here’s the weird thing: The shooters also called 911 saying that they were in an emergency situation as they claimed to be chasing down a local drug dealer named William Ellis.

With both parties on the phone with 911, one of the dispatch operators advised the injured men to pull their car over and surrender to the men who just shot them. But remember this: The shooters weren’t police officers. They weren’t FBI officials or from the Drug Enforcement Administration. They hadn’t been to anybody’s police academy, and they damn sure weren’t supervised by any serious government agency.

They were a ragtag group of bounty hunters and bail bondsmen who were searching for a man named William Ellis who owed them a lot of money because he had skipped bail on two different occasions — leaving debts of thousands of dollars to the bail bondsmen. They had paid a desperate local sex worker, Kirsten Mahon, who struggled with drug addiction, to set up a fake drug deal with Ellis so that they could perform what they called a routine “snatch and grab,” possibly squeeze some money out of him, and then turn him over to authorities. This is routine work for bail bondsmen and bounty hunters.

Except William Ellis wasn’t in the car they had shot and chased; Kirsten Mahon later testified that she tipped Ellis off in advance that people were looking for him. By the time Jaden Hogan finally pulled his car over, his cousin Jalen was already dead. The bullets recklessly fired at the car seven miles prior had ripped his insides all up. The bounty hunters and bail bondsmen would eventually swear under oath that the men in the car shot at them too, but not a single gun was found on their prey, not a single shell casing found in their car, and investigators determined that every bullet fired appeared to be fired at the victims — not from them.

Nine days later, county prosecutors threw the book at the bounty hunters and bail bondsmen— charging them with a slew of crimes ranging from first-degree murder, attempted murder, aggravated kidnapping, reckless endangerment, and damn near every other charge you can think of. It took two years for the case to finally come to trial. It was complicated as hell with 50 different witnesses, hundreds of pieces of evidence — and two of the seven defendants had flipped, agreeing to testify against the other five. Altogether, the five remaining men faced a combined 80 charges.

In the end, earlier this month, a jury found the five men not guilty on 79 different charges — only convicting one man, Joshua Young, with recklessly firing his gun in the Walmart parking lot. He might not even go to jail.

Listen, I’m a prison abolitionist. I’d like to see the whole legal system torn down and rebuilt from scratch. But how in hell a group of pissed off bounty hunters and bail bondsmen can kill an innocent man, in what at very best has to be described as a case of mistaken identity, and get away with it, is beyond me. Defense attorneys basically suggested 101 conspiracy theories, effectively planting doubts in the mind of the jury, that William Ellis really was in that car and disappeared somewhere — even though nobody ever saw any such thing happen. The attorneys also suggested that the victims really did have guns and fired them, even though no evidence whatsoever showed such a thing. Their ploy worked — in great part, I believe, because the jurors treated the bail bondsmen and bounty hunters like they would have treated law enforcement officers, giving them respect and deferring to their storyline.

In the end, it’s gun violence run amok. Jalen Milan was one of the nearly 40,000 people shot and killed that year in our country – which more and more resembles the Wild West. And at the center of these past few years, which have been some of the deadliest years ever measured for gun violence, with almost no progress whatsoever on substantive gun reform, is money. It’s always money. Money for campaigns from the NRA. Profits for the firearms industry. Money for lobbyists. And again, right at the center of the shooting death of an innocent young father, were bounty hunters and bail bondsmen so determined to get back their money from a man that they shot a stranger, thinking it was him. Guns are a problem, but dammit, the money trail is never far behind.

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