Mississippi lawmakers could put a price on the heads of undocumented migrants and authorize certified bounty hunters to locate and detain them under a new proposal in the Legislature.
But immigration attorneys, advocacy groups and community leaders tell the Mississippi Free Press that the measure is unlikely to gain traction, amounting to a political stunt designed to stoke fear and generate news coverage.
Mississippi House Bill 1484 has garnered local and national headlines since its filing on Jan. 22. Drafted by Mississippi House Rep. Justin Keen, R-Byhalia, and backed by DeSoto County District attorney Matthew Barton, the legislation would award residents $1,000 for information leading to the arrest and eventual deportation of people living in the state without authorization. It also directs the Mississippi Department of Public Safety to establish a “bounty hunter” certification program in the state, empowering eligible residents to find and detain undocumented migrants for a $1,000 reward.
The bill’s supporters have framed the bounty hunter program as an extension of the new presidential administration’s immigration agenda. By deputizing private citizens to track down undocumented migrants, Mississippi would advance President Donald Trump’s objective of deporting “as many people who are here illegally as possible,” Barton told the Mississippi Free Press on Jan. 13, ahead of the bill’s release.
After reviewing H.B. 1484, however, independent legal experts have indicated that its backers may have had other motives for introducing the legislation. Even some observers wary of oncoming legislative assaults on undocumented migrants said the bill contains so many legal pitfalls and unworkable provisions that it faces slim odds of approval in the Republican-dominated Legislature.
“It just doesn’t pass muster,” Patricia Ice, director of the legal project at the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance, told the Mississippi Free Press on Jan. 23. “There are so many things wrong with it.”
Key stakeholders in H.B. 1484 say they were not aware of the bill’s existence until the day of its release. The legislation is also a copycat version of a bill filed in Missouri last month, which would create an identical bounty hunter system targeting undocumented migrants. Neither Barton nor Keen responded to requests for comment after the measure’s release.
House Rep. Jansen Owen, R-Poplarville, vice chairman of the Judiciary B committee (one of two House committees that the bill has been referred to), expressed deep skepticism about Keen’s bill.
“I’m concerned about the constitutionality of some of those provisions,” he told the Mississippi Free Press on Jan. 24.
The Republican lawmaker explained that he had not personally reviewed the bill, but he stressed that determining the legality of immigrants was above the jurisdiction of the state to begin with.
“That’s within the purview of the federal government,” he said, adding he supports local law enforcement referring detainees to federal immigration services. But “the state doesn’t need to get in the business of enforcing federal immigration law,” he concluded.
Owen said he would be reviewing the bill himself over the weekend. But he’d heard enough to voice his personal opposition to the idea.
“I think it’s very unlikely that it’ll come out of committee,” he said.
‘A Complete Waste of Resources and Money’
Under the bounty bill, DPS would establish a state-run phone hotline, email address and online portal through which Mississippians could share anonymous tips on suspected undocumented migrants. Those confirmed to be undocumented and apprehended would be charged with “trespass by an illegal alien,” a felony that would trigger a lifelong jail sentence and the loss of future privileges like voting rights, even in the event of naturalization.
Bringing criminal charges against undocumented migrants with no prior offenses would violate federal rules around immigration proceedings, legal experts say, since removal cases generally take place in civil court.
“What they’re talking about in this bill doesn’t make sense with the existing laws for immigration, Larissa Davis, an immigration attorney based in Flowood, Mississippi, told the Mississippi Free Press on Jan. 23. “It’s a huge misunderstanding of how (immigration cases) are adjudicated.”
In lieu of a lifetime prison sentence, Keen’s bill stipulates that federal immigration officials could assume custody of detained migrants in Mississippi—provided they sign an agreement pledging to deport the detainee within 24 hours of the custody transfer. It’s unclear how much time could elapse after an arrest before state and federal officials entered such an agreement.
Here, too, Davis questioned the legality and logistics of Keen’s proposal, noting that it would be impossible to deport someone in the time frame specified in his bill.
“It’s just not feasible,” she explained. “If someone is deported because they’ve already got an existing order of deportation from a federal immigration judge, (Immigration Customs Enforcement) has to facilitate and coordinate all of that, and it takes a lot longer than 24 hours.”
Most of the concerns about H.B. 1484 center on its imagined bounty hunter program, which would allow licensed bail bond agents and surety recovery agents to locate and arrest undocumented migrants around Mississippi. To be considered for the program, the legislation calls for applicants to submit an array of personal information to DPS and prove that their bond licenses are valid.
Speaking with the Mississippi Free Press before the bill’s release, District Attorney Barton stressed that this vetting process—along with the program’s restricted eligibility—would be key to preventing wrongful arrests and lowering the risk of racial profiling.
“We’re not trying to send vigilante mobs to people’s houses,” he said on Jan. 13. “It’s going to be a lot more structured and secure and defined than that.”
Legal experts counter that enlisting civilians to help track undocumented migrants would make an already flawed, dangerous process more unsafe. Since there is no way of knowing someone’s immigration status without access to their personal documents, program participants would inevitably resort to racist stereotypes to identify suspected undocumented immigrants, one legal expert explained.
“Of course it would lead to racial profiling,” said Patricia Ice, the MIRA attorney. “If somebody approached me and thought that I was undocumented, how would they prove on the spot that I’m not a U.S. citizen?”
Ice, Davis and other experts worry that Keen’s bill does not clearly define the scope of bounty hunters’ powers under the program. While the legislation states that certified bounty hunters could “apprehend” undocumented migrants, it does not specify whether DPS would assign their targets or whether bounty hunters could go after anyone they suspected of living in Mississippi illegally. This ambiguous language, Davis argues, makes the program ripe for abuse.
For all her concerns about wrongful detainments and abuses of power, Davis’ main gripe with H.B. 1484 is that it is unnecessary. The federal government already has a tipline where civilians can report suspected undocumented migrants, she explained, and ICE agents have sophisticated tools to separate people without legal status from refugees and others with protected status.
The redundancy of H.B. 1484, coupled with its many legal pitfalls and inflated penalties, makes Davis suspect that the bill is more a ploy for attention than a good-faith attempt at legislating.
“It’s a complete waste of resources and money,” she said. “I hope that lawmakers do read it, so they can see … all the flaws and constitutional problems that it raises.”
‘Some Things Are Just Not Our Affair’
In proposing a sweeping new role for bounty hunters in Mississippi, Keen appears to have neglected to consult the primary organization representing one key group: bounty hunters in Mississippi. Mike Morrison, president of the Mississippi Bail Agents Association, told the Mississippi Free Press on Jan. 23 that neither he nor his organization had been included in the drafting of the bill.
“We were not consulted (for this bill),” Morrison said. “We have not endorsed this. We, like you, saw this in the news and said ‘Oh God.’”
And even as an expert with decades of experience in the bail industry, the details of the bill baffled Morrison, with its insertion of a very specific type of professional into the role of border enforcer and domestic spy.
“Some things are just not our affair,” Morrison said. “I don’t have the answer for immigration … in our opinion, it will only be messy for our industry.”
Bounty hunters—more accurately called bail enforcement agents—operate under a very specific aegis of legality. It is the contract between a defendant and a bail agent that permits the agent to detain the specific individual who has skipped bail. The contract is key: without it, bail agents face the same legal liabilities as any other civilian. No contract would protect these individuals in the act of detaining undocumented migrants, and Keen’s bill offers no insights into how “bounty hunters” could approach individuals without a pre-existing civil agreement that empowers them to act.
“In this instance, what they’re proposing, I don’t have a contract,” Morrison said. “I’m not doing that. As a business owner, who (has) got assets and a family and children, would you jump on this opportunity?”
Morrison lamented what he sees as another misinterpretation of the bail industry’s role in the justice system, one that paints a lurid picture of seedy manhunters operating in a legal—and moral—gray area.
“We already have a negative connotation,” he said. “People try to paint us as something we’re not … (people) hire us to come and get them out of jail. We don’t want the state housing people that don’t have to be housed.”
Missouri’s Original Bill
Keen’s bill is a virtual carbon copy of an immigrant bounty hunting bill proposed in late 2024 in Missouri. Missouri Sen. David Gregory, R-St. Louis, told the Mississippi Free Press in a Jan. 23 interview that he wrote his bill himself and hadn’t personally been in contact with Keen, but that bills like his are often picked up across states by similarly interested legislators.
While Keen’s intent for his implementation of a bounty hunting program may differ from Gregory’s, the Missouri senator explained the finer points of how the program would be implemented in his own state if passed.
As Gregory explains it, the bounty hunting program and the tipline would be fundamentally linked and bounty hunters would only be authorized to pursue immigrants when employees of the Department of Public Safety investigate reports and issue warrants for individuals.
“This bounty hunter program is a special credentialed program that allows (bail agents) to effectuate arrest warrants for the Department of Public Safety,” Gregory said. “So there wouldn’t be a required contract. It would be effectuating an arrest like any other peace officer.”
That would still be a dramatic departure from how the bail system works, and Gregory admitted to even larger constitutional questions since it is the purview of the federal government to determine the legality of any individual’s presence in the United States, not the states.
“But the federal government has laws on the books saying this person’s legal (or) this person is illegal,” he said. “We’re not going to determine who is and isn’t legal. We’re going to follow the laws of the federal government and enforce them in Missouri.”
‘They’ve Out-Organized Us’
At a Mississippi Immigrant Rights Association public event on a cold Wednesday morning this week, Lead Organizer Luis Espinoza looked out on an uncomfortably empty room. He blamed the weather for the poor attendance before admitting that the greater reason was simple: fear.
The filing of House Bill 1484 in Mississippi comes amid an escalating crackdown on undocumented immigration in Washington, D.C. On his first day back in office, Trump signed a flurry of executive orders centered on immigration, including a national emergency declaration sending additional troops to the southern border and a measure to end birthright citizenship for children of undocumented parents. The effort to terminate birthright citizenship has already triggered legal action from more than 20 states.
Separately, Congress has given final approval to the Laken Riley Act, clearing the way for Trump to sign it into law. The legislation, which received Democratic support in the House and Senate, would require federal authorities to detain undocumented migrants arrested or charged with minor crimes.
Washington’s rightward lurch on immigration has emboldened state lawmakers to draft legislation that stirs up nationalistic sentiments and spreads panic and disinformation about undocumented populations, immigrant advocates told the Mississippi Free Press.
“They’re playing on ignorance,” Lorena Quiroz, executive director of Mississippi’s Immigrant Alliance for Justice and Equity, said on Jan. 22. “These bills … are creating this whole nationalistic infrastructure of ‘America the Great’ and erasing people of color from state histories.”
Since the start of Mississippi’s legislative session on Jan. 7, lawmakers other than Keen have also put forward legislation that explicitly targets undocumented migrants and their allies.
One bill from Mississippi House Rep. Becky Currie, R-Brookhaven, would punish residents who employ or assist undocumented migrants in various ways, making it a felony to transport them into Mississippi and penalizing business owners who hire them without proper vetting. The legislation, modeled after a controversial and partly blocked Florida statute, failed to become law last year when Currie originally introduced it. She did not respond to requests for comment about her bill.
Another bill in the Senate, authored by Mississippi Sen. Angela Burks Hill, R-Picayune, would bar people living in the U.S. without legal status from entering Mississippi.
While both measures face an uphill battle in the state Legislature (and would likely draw legal challenges if passed), their introduction sends a clear message to undocumented people living in Mississippi, Quiroz said. Releasing and promoting the bills also creates divisions within the state’s immigrant communities, pitting lawful residents against those without legal status.
“(They are) creating a divide in families and … in communities,” she said. “I’ve seen tactics in some counties where Republicans were working really, really hard to get Latino folks on their side.”
To become law in Mississippi, H.B. 1484 must clear two separate committees before advancing through the House and Senate with a simple majority vote and then making it to Gov. Tate Reeves’ desk. The bill’s many logistical challenges will make it hard for it to get past the committee phase, legal experts say.
“It’s not going to pass,” Ice predicted, adding that she can’t envision a scenario where legislation with so many legal issues makes it to the governor’s desk.
In Quiroz’s mind, however, the outsize attention that H.B. 1484 has received in the days since its filings means its supporters have already won.
“They’ve out-organized us,” she concluded. “Folks that want to erase the power of people of color have out-organized us with our own people. It’s scary.”
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