The Department of Homeland Security spent $464 million on airplanes that were supposed to be used for deportation flights, but instead have been sitting mostly unused at an airport in Lake Charles, Louisiana.
The New York Times reports that the 10 used jets, which were purchased through a no-bid contract with a northern Virginia business with ties to former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, have barely been used. Seven of the planes, older Boeing 737s, aren’t being used because DHS doesn’t have the staff to operate them, the Times reports, citing an internal government document.
Three of the plans are luxury business jets, and DHS has sought to lease or loan two of them to other agencies, including one of them to the FBI for use by Director Kash Patel, the agency said in a letter to Democrats on the Senate Appropriations Committee.
The firm that got the contract for the planes is Daedalus Aviation Corporation, whose chairman donated to a political action committee headed by Noem. But DHS may not have needed the planes in the first place, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement has a history of using planes chartered from private companies for deportation flights, as well as military and Coast Guard jets.
Former acting Director of ICE John Sandweg, who served under the Obama administration, told the Times that “if you asked me to write a list of the things ICE needed to increase the number of deportations, buying its own fleet of airplanes would absolutely not make the top ten.”
When the Times contacted DHS for comment, a spokesperson blamed Noem, whom President Donald Trump fired in March.
“The contract for Daedalus was made and approved by department leadership before Secretary Mullin was sworn in,” DHS said in a statement, adding that the department “reserves the right to adjust course in an environment with evolving requirements and demands.”
A spokesperson for Noem disagreed, telling the Times that the jet purchase was finalized under her successor Markwayne Mullin. The contract size reportedly went up by $303 million on the day Mullin was sworn in.
Regardless of who is responsible, the jets are wasting taxpayer dollars sitting on a tarmac. Democratic Senators Chris Murphy and Patty Murray, who sit on the Senate Appropriations Committee, say that DHS officials told them that most of the planes would not be used for deportations after all.
“The American people deserve a full accounting of this gross misuse of their tax dollars,” Murray and Murphy wrote in a letter to the department.
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