The Washington Examiner reports that former DHS head Kristi Noem was not the only division head prone to blow cash on big adventures such as a $220 million series of television advertisements. A former Trump administration official wasted millions of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement taxpayer dollars purchasing thousands of employee vehicles that are now unusable, according to three sources
“ICE’s top brass are quietly searching for a way to amend the remainder of a massive order of pick-up trucks and SUVs that were ordered last year and slated to be wrapped with the agency’s name, logo, and motto, as well as storing away many vehicles that have been delivered to ICE facilities across the country,” reports the Washington Examiner.
“ICE has never had marked vehicles,” one source familiar with the purchases told the Examiner. “In talking to people, they’re like, ‘We don’t want to use these, we can’t.'”
The saga, according to Examiner, “is the latest controversial expenditure of taxpayer money within the Department of Homeland Security and speaks to the different ways political appointees at the department have tried to approach operations versus how career law enforcement officials have historically done so.”
President Donald Trump’s One Big, Beautiful Bill allocated $170 billion over four years for border security and immigration enforcement, and people in charge of purchase orders appear to be giving less thought to how that money is spent. For example, assaults against ICE personnel have risen 8,000 percent over the past year, according to the DHS. The threat is so serious that federal police now opt to hide their faces while conducting business in public. They also frequently resort to rental vehicles, and they switch license plates on rental vehicles to avoid detection by activists, who track the plates of suspected ICE vehicles with crowdsourced databases.
But despite the value of secrecy in today’s hostile environment, ICE’s former deputy director, Madison Sheahan apparently placed an expensive purchase of a bulk order for vehicles marked clearly with ICE’s logo.
Last November, the Examiner reports the agency announced it would spend $2.25 million in a no-bid contract with a prominent Republican donor, Rick Hendrick, to buy 25 Chevrolet Tahoes emblazoned with ICE’s new logo. The Examiner reports the department then spent an additional $174,000 to $230,000 to three companies to wrap the vehicles in their new markings.
“It’s ridiculous because you don’t want to advertise what you’re doing,” the first source said. “We’re just hiding them in a parking garage somewhere because we don’t want to drive them. Who wants to drive the marked vehicles?”
Sheahan was hand-picked by Noem to be the second-in-command of the 20,000-employee federal agency and its $9 billion budget. Her prior experience included serving as a political director when Noem was South Dakota’s governor. She also served as executive director of the South Dakota Republican Party, and as secretary of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.
A second source said the marked vehicles are now being used for custodial pick-ups, or when ICE retrieves someone from a local jail or state prison — not in general enforcement.