The FBI has long used immigration as both a carrot and stick to induce people to become informants. See this story from BuzzFeed last year: Welcome to America, Now Spy on Your Friends. Now the Intercept has published this article: When Informants Are No Longer Useful, the FBI Can Help Deport Them. It includes new information from the FBI’s “Confidential Human Source Police Guide”–its manual for handling informants–which uses the phrase “immigration relief dangle” to describe the dynamic. FBI agents coordinate with immigration officials to identify and pressure potential informants, and then help ICE locate them for deportation when they are no longer useful. From the article:
“It’s been clear for a decade that the FBI works with ICE to keep informants in the country. What we didn’t know was that the assistance is often contingent and temporary, and that the FBI actively assists ICE in locating informants who are no longer useful so that they may be deported.”
“’This creates a perverse incentive structure, because informants are incentivized to keep themselves valuable,’ said [immigration expert and Stanford lecturer Diala] Shamas. ‘It will further incentivize them to create investigations when there wouldn’t be one otherwise. In the traditional criminal context, the law enforcement community is conscious of the risk that coercing informants increases the likelihood of getting bad intelligence. But in the counterterrorism and intelligence context, this caution has been thrown out the window.'”
The article is by Trevor Aaronson, author of the Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism.