Motel 6 Assumes Every Customer Is A Criminal

A report out of Phoenix indicates that ICE may be paying a bounty for each undocumented immigrant that gets turned over to the agency. Agents in that Arizona city made over twenty arrests at two Motel 6 locations in predominantly Latino neighborhoods in the span of just two months, according to the Phoenix New Times. Apparently, Motel 6 employees were either instructed or paid to report potential undocumented immigrants who stayed there to ICE on a daily basis.

According to one Motel 6 employee, "We send a report every morning to ICE — all the names of everybody that comes in. Every morning at about 5 o’clock, we do the audit and we push a button and it sends it to ICE". It's nice to see that this invasion of privacy is fully automated. ICE then runs the names of the hotel's clients through its databases and searches for matches, whereupon they go to the motel and make the arrest. One immigration attorney has heard rumors that the front desk employees at Motel 6 are paid $200 for each undocumented immigrant they are able to turn over to ICE.

These are not just individual Motel 6 owners doing this of their own volition, although that would be bad enough. These two Motel 6 in question are corporate owned. And this is not the first location where the company seems to be operating as an arm of law enforcement. In Rhode Island, the Motel 6 in Warwick was also in the habit of providing a daily list of customers to the Warwick Police Department. I think we can safely assume that this practice exists in Motel 6 locations around the country. A spokesman for G6 Hospitality, the corporate owner of Motel 6, says that alerting customers to the possibility that local police will be give their person details "is not a normal process of our check-in".

If this reminds you of something that might happen in East Germany with the Stasi, then you are as old as I am. Probably well over 99 out of 100 customers of Motel 6 are decent, law-abiding citizens. There is absolutely no reason that checking into that chain of hotels should subject you to being treated as a potential criminal. If law enforcement is looking for a particular person or has reason to believe that a suspect may be at the hotel, that is one thing. But a broad search of everyone who stays each and every night reeks of authoritarianism And it is yet another example of businesses playing fast and loose with our private information.


UPDATE: After this story broke, Motel 6 says it will no longer share guest lists with ICE.