ICE Barbie Is Building Her Own Fleet of Deportation Planes

The Department of Homeland Security just paid nearly $140 million to be in charge of managing its own deportation flights. 

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has signed a multimillion-dollar contract to purchase six Boeing 737 aircrafts from Daedalus Aviation Corporation, whose owners already have ties to massive DHS contracts, The Washington Post reported Wednesday. 

Immigration and Customs Enforcement previously chartered planes to carry out deportations. DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told the Post that owning its own planes would allow ICE to “operate more effectively, including by using more efficient flight patterns.” 

Now the agency would be responsible for managing its own fleet of aircraft, flight crews, and all the logistics involved in transporting immigrant detainees around and out of the country. But John Sandweg, former acting ICE director, said that dealing with all of this might be more trouble than it’s worth.  

“It’s so much easier to issue a contract to a company that already manages a fleet of airplanes,” Sandweg told the Post. “So this move I’m surprised by because what the administration wants to accomplish, by and large, can be accomplished through charter flights already.”

$140 million is just a small drop in the $170 billion bucket that is DHS’s new four-year budget—but it’s not clear that the decision to run its own deportation airline won’t incur more costs as part of the Trump’s administration’s ongoing efforts to drive up the rate of removals.

The owners of Daedalus Aviation, William Allen Walters III and Taundria Cappel, are also the figures behind Salus Worldwide Solutions Corporation, which won a three-year $915 million air services contract to carry out deportations. That contract is the subject of an ongoing lawsuit, over allegations that it was an “unlawful, rushed, and non-competitive award.”