One of the legal ways that non-migrants can make money from the migration business is to lend money (for bonds) to illegal aliens in trouble with the law. The bonds are designed to make sure that an alien involved shows up at scheduled court hearings and meets other requirements.
There is also substantial illegal money to be made in this business. As the Washington Post reported on April 4, a single firm in Virginia took in so much money from this business illegally to warrant a total penalty of $811 million, an amount large enough to threaten the firm involved with bankruptcy.
The firm is Libre by Nexus, and it is located far from migrant populations; it is in Verona, Va., population 4,582, in the northern Shenandoah Valley. A federal judge in Roanoke, Va., found, according to the Post, that the company owed the federal consumer protection agency $231 million in restitution plus massive civil penalties. The company, which operates throughout the United States, plans to appeal the verdict.
Immigration bonds are somewhat similar to bonds in the criminal court system, and perform the same service, making sure that the individual involved shows up in court when needed.
It is also a program that operates on a lot of relatively small-scale cases; TRAC, the Syracuse University research outfit, estimates that in CY 2024, the median bond was for $5,000.
Lending money to lots of people at $5,000 a crack, despite high fees, is not a very profitable business, as Libre must have found, because it added a new element to its dealings with many of the aliens (illegal ones by definition). It insisted that many of them must wear cigarette-package-sized monitors on their legs for $420 a month. And, again according to the Post, the fee had to be paid whether the device worked or not.
The judge ruled that Libre could not do this in the future.
Five entities were charged in the case: Libre, its parent company Nexus Services, CEO Mike Donovan, and two of his associates, Richard Moore and Evan Ajin. The company has been in and out of various state and federal courts in recent years.
The sitting judge in the case is Elizabeth K. Dillion.