Taking ICE to the skies: Noem wants a whole fleet of DHS owned planes to fly deportees back to their home countries

Buying, owning, and operating its own planes could allow ICE to deport twice as many undocumented immigrants each month, former officials said

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem wants planes that Immigration and Customs and Enforcement can use to fly immigrants to their home countries in order to help achieve the Trump administration’s deportation quota, according to a report.

The agency currently uses charter and commercial planes to transport immigrants from the United States. Noem is pushing to purchase planes for ICE to own and operate, sources told NBC News.

DHS told The Independent it could not confirm this report.

Equipped with its own planes, ICE would potentially be able to deport twice as many people each month, former officials told the outlet.

Historically, ICE has chartered eight to 14 planes at a time for deportation flights, which amounted to flying roughly 15,000 deportees per month from the U.S., Jason Houser, ICE’s chief of staff from 2022 to 2023, told the outlet.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is reportedly pushing to buy planes for ICE to own and operate as the Trump administration hopes to achieve the ‘largest deportation operation’ in the country’s history (AP)

“If the goal is to get to 30 to 35,000 removals a month, you would need to double the number of planes,” Houser said.

The Trump administration has set a target of deporting 1 million undocumented immigrants per year.

Commercial aircraft could cost anywhere from $80 million to $400 million, so buying 30 of them with that price tag could amount to $2.4 billion to $12 billion, aviation experts at the Pilot Institute, which trains people to become pilots, told NBC News.

Although he weighed whether ICE should purchase and operate its own aircraft, Houser said there weren't enough resources to do so. ICE spent $100,000 to $200,000 on each charter flight, he told the outlet.

“We only ever had 13 to 14 planes because of the amount of money and resources,” Houser said of his time in the Biden administration.

But President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” allotted $75 million for ICE over four years, giving the agency more spending power.

As of the end of July, ICE had chartered just over 1,000 flights from the U.S., Tom Cartwright, a private citizen who tracks ICE flights, told NBC News.

Each flight costs about $25,000 per hour, which pays for staffing costs and the aircraft itself, a former senior ICE official told the outlet. New planes would require pilots, flight attendants, security officers, and medical staff, as well as aircraft maintenance and ensuring FAA compliance.

The president has vowed to carry out the “the largest deportation operation in American history.”

At least 324,000 people have been removed from the U.S., as of last week, Noem announced.

However, internal data seen by several news organizations suggests the figure is much lower. The New York Times claims there have been at least 180,000 deportations as of August while NBC News says there have been 100,000 to 150,000 deportations in Trump’s first six months in office.