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Scripps News investigation revealed ICE awarded contracts worth up to $358M to private firms for home visits to 350,000 immigrant children

Scripps News reported on July 30, 2026 that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had awarded contracts to 18 private companies, worth as little as $1.2 million and as much as $358 million each, to conduct in-person home visits to roughly 100,000 current and 250,000 former unaccompanied immigrant children under a "Safety Verification Initiative." Twelve of the 18 contractors had no documented child-welfare experience, including a security firm awarded up to $358 million whose website advertises armed security and fugitive recovery rather than child services. DHS described the program as protecting children from abuse and exploitation, while immigration advocates said its real purpose is locating children and sponsor families for enforcement and collateral arrests.

Jurisdiction
Federal
Location
Washington, D.C.

Abuses documented

Actors

Scripps News reported on July 30, 2026 that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had awarded contracts to 18 private companies under a "Safety Verification Initiative" tasked with visiting the homes of roughly 100,000 current unaccompanied immigrant children and 250,000 former unaccompanied minors now aged 18 to 21. The program follows a March 2025 DHS Inspector General report that found missing or incomplete addresses on file for 31,000 unaccompanied minors. Each company's contract is required to cover a minimum of 1,000 homes; individual contract values range widely, from roughly $1.2 million up to a ceiling of $358 million for Severance Security Services Inc., an Alabama firm based out of a house in Foley that otherwise advertises armed security, disaster response and workplace-violence-prevention services with no listed child-welfare experience.

Scripps News' review of the 18 awarded companies found no reference to child-welfare services in the public-facing information for 12 of them. National Protective Services, operating out of a Texas strip mall and advertising fugitive recovery, self-defense classes and locksmith services, won a contract worth $1.2 million with potential value up to $207 million. DHS said in a statement that the program "represents ICE's commitment to protect vulnerable children from sexual abuse and exploitation." Immigration advocates disagreed: Michael Lukens, executive director of the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, called the arrangement "a facade so that DHS can find children and try and bully them into self-deportation, to find out who they're living with and to make collateral arrests."

A separate investigation by Project Salt Box into a related contract — nearly $200 million awarded to Savvy Professor LLC, a Virginia firm with no prior federal contracts, founded weeks before the award by a self-described former FBI cyber technician — found that an internal ICE document reviewed by The Guardian described the program's true purpose as building cases to deport the children or prosecute them or their sponsors, rather than verifying their welfare.

Why we recorded this

Federal agencies must operate within a lawful basis when they surveil or contact vulnerable populations; using a child-welfare rationale to mask an enforcement purpose denies families the ability to make informed decisions about government contact. ICE awarded contracts worth up to hundreds of millions of dollars to private firms — most with no documented child-welfare experience — to visit the homes of 350,000 current and former unaccompanied immigrant children, and a separate investigation found an internal ICE document describing the program's purpose as building deportation and collateral-arrest cases rather than protecting children. This archive records when the government deploys a protective framing to enable enforcement against a population it claims to be safeguarding.

Sources

  1. ICE awards contracts for companies to visit homes of child immigrants — Scripps News investigative accessed July 31, 2026
  2. ICE awards nearly $200 million in migrant-child location work to a Virginia firm with no prior federal contracts — Project Salt Box investigative accessed July 31, 2026

See also