WASHINGTON — Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is pushing for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to use an influx of funds to buy, own and operate its own fleet of airplanes to deport immigrants, two sources familiar with the discussions told NBC News. Former officials said that ICE owning and maintaining its own planes would be costly but could make it easier for the agency to potentially double the number of people it deports each month.
ICE uses charter planes to deport immigrants and has done so for years. The agency has typically chartered eight to 14 planes at a time for deportation flights, according to Jason Houser, who served as ICE chief of staff from 2022 to 2023. He said that allowed the Biden administration to deport roughly 15,000 immigrants per month on charter flights.
“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, or purchase roughly 30 planes.
With a guaranteed set of 30 or more planes, ICE wouldn’t be constrained by the limits of the companies it contracts with, which charter their planes to multiple clients.
The Trump administration has vowed to deport 1 million undocumented immigrants per year. ICE deported 100,000 to 150,000 in his first six months in office, according to internal data that includes voluntary self-departures in which immigrants left the U.S. on their own. The exact number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. is disputed but is estimated to be in the millions.
It can cost $80 million to $400 million to buy a commercial airliner, according to aviation experts at the Pilot Institute, a company that trains pilots. Purchasing 30 passenger jets at that price range could cost $2.4 billion to $12 billion, but it’s unclear if ICE could lower the price per plane by buying a large number of them.
The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Charter companies are also responsible for maintaining the planes and making sure they comply with Federal Aviation Administration rules. If Noem creates the first ICE air fleet, the agency would then be responsible for staffing the planes with pilots, medics and security, as well as maintaining them and ensuring they comply with aviation regulations.
Thanks to $30 billion for ICE deportation efforts from President Donald Trump’s spending law known as the “big, beautiful bill,” Noem may have the funds to begin an airline and staff it accordingly. In all, the bill gave ICE over $75 billion, exponentially increasing its $9.5 billion annual budget.
And as ICE rapidly increases the number of people it detains, Houser said, more deportations are needed to avoid overcrowding in detention centers.
Tom Cartwright, a private citizen who tracks ICE flights through planes’ tail numbers, said ICE had chartered just over 1,000 flights from the U.S. by the end of July.
Each of those flights costs roughly $25,000 per hour, according to a former senior ICE official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The $25,000 per hour covers the cost of the charter plane, pilots, flight attendants, security personnel and on-site medical personnel, the official said. When the charter planes are not being used by ICE, they are leased to other clients, including professional sports teams and political campaigns.
Houser said he considered having ICE buy and operate its own planes during the Biden administration, but the agency did not have the funding. For each charter flight, he said, ICE paid $100,000 to $200,000.
“We only ever had 13 to 14 planes because of the amount of money and resources,” Houser said.
