Noem’s luxury ‘deportation’ jet is the tip of the ICE-berg

NBC News reported last week what avgeeks and ICE watchers have been talking about for months: Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has been flying around on a recently acquired luxury Boeing 737. DHS told NBC the jet, which is worth an estimated $70 million and comes with a queen bed, showers, a kitchen, and four flat-screen TVs, would serve a “dual purpose” for Cabinet-level official travel and deportations.

Obviously, this is bullshit – flight data shows it has never done anything resembling a deportation – but the situation is actually so much worse than this one 737. Over the last four months, Noem’s DHS has acquired at least nine new airplanes, with another on the way. Of those, half appear to be luxury jets.

The latest, a 2016 Gulfstream 650, popped onto my radar (pun intended) on Feb. 20, flying from Joint Base Andrews in Maryland to Nashville and back, registered to DHS. A day earlier, it had been registered to Valkyrie Aviation Holdings Group, part of a shadowy network of shell companies connected to MAGA-aligned former State Department officials. Together, these companies have gotten more than a billion dollars in DHS contracts in a matter of months.

This story will put together reporting from Vanity Fair, Mother Jones, The War Zone, and The Washington Post, along with new information and my own reporting, to reveal the full scale of DHS's fleet expansion.

Last August, DHS boasted that “Noem personally reviews and approves any contract above $100,000.” Like the stockpiling of weapons and fast-tracked warehouse purchases all over the country, the rapid acquisition of these aircraft shows that Noem’s DHS is swimming in cash and out of control.

DHS did not respond to a detailed list of questions about the facts in this story, or to follow-up queries.

OpMed

But first, a little back story.

William A. Walters III ran the State Department’s Operational Medicine directorate from its inception during the Obama years through the first Trump administration. Also called “OpMed,” the team was essentially a medevac unit that arose from the ashes of Benghazi. Walters, a former Army surgeon, stayed on when Biden came in, and in May 2021, Vanity Fair wrote a glowing piece describing how his team used their emergency logistics skills and sheer bravado to deliver the COVID-19 vaccine to embassies all over the world, even when it ruffled diplomatic feathers.

Three months after the first story, the magazine published a bizarre follow-up. Walters had abruptly quit OpMed after the new Secretary of State decided to scrap an expansion promised by his predecessor. What’s more, Walters claimed – with little evidence – that the US’s messy withdrawal from Afghanistan was a direct result of that decision.

Many OpMed staffers appear to have followed Walters’ out the door, including his deputy, Taundria Cappel. Over the next few years, Walters and Cappel started at least a dozen companies, all registered to the same Arlington, VA, office building. All of the companies also had mythological names: Soteria Solutions, Atlas Management Services, Salus Worldwide Solutions.

Somewhere in there, Walters seems to have gone full MAGA. In November 2024, a few weeks after the election, he accepted a “Patriot Award” at a Mar-a-Lago gala attended by the former president president-elect.

Salus Worldwide Solutions

The next summer, DHS handed a monster contract worth up to $915 million to Salus Worldwide Solutions to provide flights for immigrants wishing to “self-deport.”

The contract was weird for number of reasons, as Dan Friedman and Nick Schwellenbach revealed in Mother Jones. First, it was awarded by DHS’s Office of Strategy, Policy, and Plans, not by ICE, which typically manages all immigrant removal flights. Second, at the time the office awarded the contract, it was headed by a former State Department colleague of Walters and Cappel, who, they reported took meetings at Salus’s office. Third, and perhaps most glaring, Walters and Cappel have no aviation industry experience. Sure, they chartered many planes as medical professionals at OpMed, but that does not aviation industry experience make.

ICE’s current flight broker, CSI Aviation – which has its own shady provenance and a $1.5 billion contract – sued, alleging the Salus contract was noncompetitive and improperly awarded. It’s unclear how the case has impacted the fulfillment of the contract; in a joint status report filed Feb. 19, CSI and DHS told the court they had not been able to come to a mutual agreement about how to move forward.

Walters and Cappel did not respond to requests for comment. An attempt to visit their Arlington office was not successful; there was no receptionist in the building lobby, no one came in or out in the hour I spent there, and elevators were only accessible with a key card.

Daedalus Aviation

Next, DHS signed a $140 million contract with Daedalus Aviation to facilitate the purchase of up to six Boeing 737s to start ICE’s own deportation fleet, first reported in mid-December by Marianne LeVine and Jacob Bogage at the Washington Post. Daedalus was headed up by Walters and Cappel, the same people behind Salus, they noted.

Over the Christmas break, a source at Avelo Airlines told me the budget airline had been offered a huge sum for the immediate sale of a handful of its Boeing 737s. The source did not know who the buyers were, but over the next few days, I watched the Federal Aviation Administration’s aircraft registry as five Avelo planes quietly transferred ownership to Daedalus.

I was still pitching this story to outlets in early January when Avelo announced it was getting out of the ICE flight racket. “We won! We stopped Avelo’s ICE flights,” some of the wonderful activists in the boycott movement told me. I did not have the heart to tell them that while their movement certainly played a role in Avelo’s decision to cut bait, these planes would in all likelihood, keep flying shackled people for ICE.

On Jan. 10 and 11, all five planes shed their Avelo callsigns and flew down to Lake Charles, LA – a common stop for planes in need of a new paint job and some remodeling. And what do you know, another Boeing 737 I was familiar with had recently spent time there.

Valkyrie Aviation Holdings Group

Back in mid-December, Joseph Trevithick at the military news site The War Zone (TWZ) did a deep dive on the mysterious 737 that had recently emerged from Lake Charles with a DHS seal, “UNITED STATES OF AMERICA” written on the side, and a livery identical to the one Trump had picked in his first term for the new Air Force One, which Biden had subsequently scrapped as too expensive.

As avgeeks noted at the time, this tired livery style is just an upside-down version of Trump’s own plane, with an extra gold stripe and clip art-style wavy flag tossed in for good tacky measure. The plane also had a custom registration number: N471US. Might the “47” be an homage to a certain 47th president?

The planes’ then-owner, Valkyrie Aviation Holdings Group, had reserved eight more n-numbers: N472US through N479US, Trevithick noted. He also pointed out the WaPo story about Daedalus and the DHS deportation fleet, but given this 737’s luxury interior, it seemed “ill-suited to conducting deportation flights,” he wrote, and could not say if Daedalus and Valkyrie were related.

But here’s the thing: Valkyrie’s office is just one floor up from the Daedalus office in the same darn building as all of Walters and Cappel’s other ventures. Daedalus also recently posted a job listing for Gulfstream 650 pilots, despite not owning any G650s. But Valkyrie does!

Or at least, it did, for a single day last week, when it flew from Dallas’s Love Field to Dulles, Atlanta, Charleston, and Joint Base Andrews. The next day it was DHS property.

And, as I write this, another one just stepped into the light. Some time in the last few months, it’s hard to tell when, the reserved n-number N472US was also assigned to a G650. This one was registered to a non-mythically themed company – Vigilant Aviation Holdings Group – at a Delaware address frequently used by anonymous shell companies. This plane has spent the last month at Ardmore Municipal Airport in Oklahoma – yet another place airplanes go when they need a refresh.

It appears to have just completed its metamorphosis, flying to Love Field, according to public flight data. DHS is listed as its owner.

C104

So that’s eight planes – the five Avelo 737s, the luxury 737, and the two G650s. We’re still not done! Because last October, during the longest government shutdown in American history, Noem’s DHS announced it was replacing one of the US Coast Guard’s Gulfstream 550s – the ones already designated for DHS and USCG leadership travel – with two Gulfstream 700s.

One of these G550s was, by all accounts, getting a little old, and $50 million had already been budgeted for its replacement. Noem picked a time when her 260,000 employees weren’t receiving paychecks to announce the replacement would be upgraded and doubled. The first of these G7s, which uses the callsign C104, arrived on Jan. 29, according to flight data.

And it looked ... strange.

This is what the airframes in USCG’s fleet usually look like, including the C102 jet Noem had been using:

And this is what the new “Coast Guard” jet looks like, according to flight data and the DHS Flickr feed:

No orange. No light blue. No USCG seal or “Semper Paratus.” Just upside-down Trump.

The second G7 is scheduled for delivery later this year. The USCG did not respond to a request for comment.

The Cost

Ordinarily in my ICE flight reporting, the cost to taxpayers is one of the things I write about the least, because the enormous suffering of the migrants onboard is always so much more important. But seeing as how not one damn deportation has occurred on DHS’s new fleet, let’s get into the public purse.

First, the G7s. We know $50 million had been budgeted for a replacement. The New York Times reports the two upgraded jets will cost $172 million. From where in the USCG budget is that extra $122 million coming? We have no idea! But there’s a Coast Guard member on Reddit whose office hasn't had heat all winter and was just told the funds to fix the HVAC system had dried up, and I don’t think he’s going to be happy about the new jets.

Next, the 737s. Daedalus’s contract to acquire six and stand up an airline was for $140 million. That was always going to be aspirational, but with the luxury 737 alone costing half that, it’s downright impossible. And that doesn’t even factor in the cost of refurbishment or hiring and training the crew they are trying to hire and train. Is that coming from the $915 million Salus contract in the middle of a lawsuit? We have no idea!

DHS tried to convince NBC News that using the luxury 737 for deportations would “sav[e] the American taxpayer hundreds of millions of dollars,” because, “this plane flies at 40 percent cheaper than what the military aircraft flies for ICE deportation flights.” Which, honestly, was a pathetic attempt at the grift.

Military ICE flights are rare, and among the most expensive – some estimates are as high as $28,500 per flight hour. Forty percent off of $28,500 makes $17,000 an hour – still more than CSI Aviation charges for a 737 – $15,865 per flight hour – on its most recent price list. And the latter will fit more passengers.

Lastly, let me say something about where these planes are going. I’ve logged every flight for the USCG jets and the luxury 737 going back to October, and while it is often not possible to know who is using which plane and for what reason, let me just say: Those 17 trips to Noem’s hometown of Watertown, SD, in the last 18 weeks? That was her.

If she misses it so much, perhaps she should go back to stay. Preferably via Greyhound.

Thank you for reading. I am a former Washington Post staff writer, and as far as I know, I’m the only journalist in America covering ICE flights full time. I am committed to keeping this reporting non-paywalled, but if you are able, please sign up for a paid subscription or send me a one-time tip, so I can continue this important work. –Gillian