According to Bloomberg, “seven Boeing Co. 737-700 jets, acquired for hundreds of millions of dollars and meant to ramp up President Donald Trump’s deportation campaign, have barely left the ground at southwest Louisiana’s Lake Charles Regional Airport,” Bloomberg said.
“They are the fleet that was acquired this year by Kristi Noem for the Department of Homeland Security, before she was fired after spending more than $200 million on a self-promotional ad campaign and amid withering criticism from Republicans over her leadership.”
First reported in August by the New York Times, with a eye-busting purchase of $464 million, the planes are still collecting dirt and litter where they began. Each of the planes has conducted fewer than “five flights since April 2026,” reported Bloomberg, citing data from ADS-B Exchange, which tracks aircraft around the world.
“The fate of the planes is emblematic of how DHS under Noem, and with the guidance of advisor Corey Lewandowski, pursued splashy projects that have since been criticized by Democrats and Republicans for wasteful spending,” Bloomberg reports. “Some of the initiatives, including the advertising campaign that featured Noem riding a horse near Mount Rushmore, were canceled. A plan to convert warehouses into mega-immigration detention centers has largely been scrapped even after the government spent more than $1 billion acquiring the facilities.”
Even more controversially, the contract to purchase the planes brought attention to an even bigger issue with the second Trump administration beyond its wastefulness: Trump’s love of no-bid contracts awarded to people with connections to Trump or his cabinet secretaries. In this case, the company that received this contract, Daedalus Aviation Corporation, is led by a chairman who had donated to a political committee supporting the previous homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem.
In March, on Noem’s final day on the job, the department acquired five jets from Daedalus Aviation. This included two Gulfstream business jets and a Boeing business jet, advertised in an online listing as featuring 17 passenger seats, a full kitchen and two bedrooms.
The purchase was originally sold as an effort to increase deportations, but Bloomberg reports the government has instead increased the pace of deportation flights using existing contractors.
John Sandweg, a former acting ICE director in the Obama administration, questioned the need for a government-owned fleet, complete with new maintenance and staffing costs. Aircraft availability, he said, has never significantly constrained ICE’s ability to conduct deportations in the first place.
“Why would you want to own your own fleet when you own all the problems?” said Sandweg.
The Department of Human Service, now run by Trump ally and former Oklahoma senator Markwayne Mullin, is looking for alternatives to use the planes, but some of the planes are not young, Bloomberg reports.
One of the 737s earmarked for conversion to fly Congressional delegations is an 18-year-old aircraft that “has operated just one flight, a loop around Lake Charles on Sept. 16, according to the ADS-B Exchange data” … and another 737 designated for upgrades is 22 years old and probably only conducted a handful of flights in May and September, according to aircraft tracking.
