How To Make Millions Off People Who Think You’re Helping Them

In a new partnership, Radio Ambulante and two investigative journalists from Univisión, Inti Pacheco and Alejandro Fernández, came together to narrate their reporting through sound.

The pair began their work crunching numbers related to asylum claims, which led them to realize gaping discrepancies in how bail is distributed by U.S. immigration courts and judges.

… After going through the data they got from the Department of Justice, Inti and Alejandro realized the bail system is as arbitrary as the asylum system.

Let’s just take this example: if you are detained in Chicago, you are going to pay an average of $5000 dollars. But if you are detained in Los Angeles, you will pay an average of $17,000.”

Determined to get a handle on the real-world human toll, Pacheco and Fernández decided to crowd-source. They created a public survey, and in under a week 168 people relayed their experiences. Many mentioned the company Libre by Nexus, a subsidiary of Nexus Services run by an ex-con who’d served time for committing fraud.

When Donovan got out of prison he started lobbying for these bail bonds agencies, because he had not been able to post his own $45,000 bail. And then he found a business niche: immigrants who could not post bail.

For a monthly fee of $420, the business offered to bail non-U.S. citizens out of detention, but the bailees had to agree to wear an ankle monitor and pay 20 percent of their bail up front. The company’s marketing frames it as a friend to immigrants.

Told in both Spanish and translated online into English, this story deftly illuminates a niche of immigration detention profiteering carried out by a company currently under investigation by multiple state authorities, and the human impact of its apparent greed.