The Trump administration has quietly hired a team of scandal-plagued private debt collectors to hound immigrants slapped with new multimillion-dollar civil penalties for not leaving the country, according to documents reviewed by the Lever. All of the companies previously worked on a federal student loan debt collection program shut down for widespread abuses.

One private collection notice obtained by the Lever assessed a $1.8 million fine on its recipient, the maximum penalty allowed under immigration law, plus another half a million in fees and interest charges, bringing the total to $2.3 million.

That notice is not a one-off. According to immigration lawyers, there’s been a recent uptick in collection letters from private firms demanding immigrants pay multimillion-dollar fines, which the Department of Homeland Security began imposing last year.