Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is pushing a new plan that could reshape how Immigration and Customs Enforcement carries out deportations: buying planes outright. According to two sources who spoke with the press, Noem wants ICE to use a massive influx of new funding to purchase, own, and operate its own fleet of passenger aircraft rather than relying on private charter companies.
The proposal would mark a significant shift in how the agency operates. For years, ICE has chartered between eight and 14 planes at a time to carry out deportations. That model allowed the Biden administration to move about 15,000 people per month, former ICE chief of staff Jason Houser said. But the charter system comes with limits. Private companies lease planes to multiple clients—meaning ICE is often constrained by what’s available.
Noem’s thinking is straightforward: if the agency had its own fleet of roughly 30 planes, it could potentially double removals to 30,000 or more each month. That would put ICE closer to achieving President Donald Trump’s pledge to deport a million undocumented immigrants annually, an ambitious goal that far outpaces anything the U.S. has done before.
But the logistics are staggering. A commercial airliner can run anywhere from $80 million to $400 million. At that rate, a 30-plane fleet could cost the government somewhere between $2.4 billion and $12 billion, not including ongoing maintenance, compliance with Federal Aviation Administration regulations, and the cost of staffing planes with pilots, medics, and security personnel. Charter companies currently cover all of those responsibilities for ICE.
The money, however, may no longer be an obstacle. Trump’s “big, beautiful bill”—a sprawling spending law that handed ICE more than $75 billion—boosted the agency’s resources almost eightfold from its $9.5 billion annual budget. Roughly $30 billion of that funding is earmarked specifically for deportation operations. That could give Noem the financial leeway to build the first-ever ICE airline.
The scale of existing operations shows just how significant the shift would be. Tom Cartwright, a private citizen who tracks deportation flights, said ICE had already chartered more than 1,000 flights by the end of July this year. Each one costs about $25,000 per hour, according to a former ICE official. When not flying immigrants out of the country, the same planes are sometimes leased to professional sports teams or political campaigns.
Houser, who considered a similar plan during the Biden years, said the idea wasn’t new. “We only ever had 13 to 14 planes because of the amount of money and resources,” he recalled. “If the goal is 30 to 35,000 removals a month, you’d need double that.”
What’s different now is that Noem may finally have both the political will and the cash to make it happen.
