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

Source: The Independent

Thursday 21 August 2025 15:09 BST


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.

Read more: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/noem-dhs-ice-planes-deportations-b2811754.html