Donald Trump’s administration is scooping up six Boeing 737 planes to support the president’s mass deportation agenda, giving the Department of Homeland Security its own fleet of jetliners to speed up removals rather than rely on charter flights.
Most removal flights are arranged under Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Air Operations, which hires out private charter companies to transfer detained immigrants across the country or deport them elsewhere.
But for the first time, ICE is buying its own deportation planes. The $140 million deal with the firm Daedalus Aviation saves government money “by allowing ICE to operate more effectively, including by using more efficient flight patterns,” Homeland Security assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin told The Washington Post, which first reported the transaction.
She said the deal is one of the “cost-effective and innovative ways of delivering on the American people’s mandate for mass deportations of criminal illegal aliens.”
The Trump administration has set a goal of removing one million people from the country by the end of the president’s first year in office. ICE is on pace to deport more than 600,000 people by the end of the year, while nearly 70,000 people are in ICE custody in detention centers across the country.
The Boeing deal with Daedalus Aviation pulls cash from more than $170 billion earmarked for the president’s anti-immigration agenda inside a massive domestic spending bill that the president signed into law earlier this year.
That massive infusion of taxpayer dollars has allowed Homeland Security to spend enormous sums on ICE operations, including a hiring spree to add thousands more removal officers to the ranks and expanding capacity for detention facilities to jail more people.
The CEO of the Virginia-based company holds an identical role with Salus Worldwide Solutions, which received a nearly $1 billion contract from Homeland Security to support the government’s “self-deportation” efforts.
The administration’s latest deal with Daedalus does not yet appear in government databases.
ICE has overseen more than 1,700 deportation flights to 77 countries since Trump took office, as of the end of October, according to immigrants’ rights advocacy group Human Rights First.
But ICE also flies thousands of people internally, including moving immigrants from detention centers to staging facilities where they await their removal.
Louisiana serves as the nation’s largest deportation hub, with one of its nine detention centers built next to an airport tarmac. Within the first seven months of Trump’s second presidency, more than 40,000 people passed through the facility, either en route to another detention center or flown out of the country.
Trump, meanwhile, has bought up roughly $6 million worth of corporate bonds in Boeing, even as his administration awards the company multi-billion dollar contracts.
The president bought between $1 million and $5 million worth of Boeing bonds on August 28, and one month later purchased Boeing bonds worth between $500,000 and $1 million, according to financial disclosures.
He appears to have bought at least $185 million worth of corporate and municipal bonds since the start of his presidency.
Trump’s Department of Justice has also dropped a criminal conspiracy case against Boeing after 356 people were killed in 737 Max jetliner crashes.
