Category: New York Times

WASHINGTON — Starting last fall, the Department of Homeland Security spent $464 million on a no-bid contract to buy 10 used airplanes from a firm in northern Virginia.

That was an enormous price tag, but the department said it had no time to consider other offers. The planes were needed urgently for deportation flights.

But since then, the department has barely used this new fleet — for deportations, or anything else.

Three of the aircraft are luxury business jets. Just months after acquiring them, the department sought to loan or lease two to other agencies, including one for the use of FBI Director Kash Patel, according to a letter to the department sent Wednesday by top Democrats on the Senate Appropriations Committee.

The other seven are older Boeing 737 passenger jets, which the government has left parked at an airport in Lake Charles, La., for months at a time. An internal government document, obtained by the New York Times, said the agency did not have the staff necessary to operate them.

The acquisitions were part of a surge of rushed contracts handed out recently by the Homeland Security Department, which has repeatedly used the need for “urgency” to bypass regular contracting procedures. The idled planes highlight the risks of that approach. The agency rushed headlong to spend nearly half a billion dollars, only to end up with planes it did not fly.

The contract also illuminated a broader trend within the second Trump administration: no-bid contracts awarded to people with connections to Trump or his cabinet secretaries. The company that received this contract, Daedalus Aviation Corp., is led by a chairperson who had donated to a political committee supporting the previous Homeland Security secretary, Kristi Noem.

The department’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has long outsourced its deportation flights by chartering planes from private companies. It also uses military and Coast Guard aircraft. Because of that, former immigration officials said, there seemed to be little need for the department to take on the expense of buying and maintaining a significant number of its own aircraft.

“If you asked me to write a list of the things ICE needed to increase the number of deportations, buying its own fleet of airplanes would absolutely not make the top 10,” said John Sandweg, a former acting director of ICE during the Obama administration.

In a written statement, the Homeland Security Department sought to shift responsibility for the contract to Noem. President Donald Trump fired her in March, and appointed Markwayne Mullin, a Republican senator from Oklahoma, as secretary.

“The contract for Daedalus was made and approved by department leadership before Secretary Mullin was sworn in,” the department said in a statement. The agency said it “reserves the right to adjust course in an environment with evolving requirements and demands.”

A spokesperson for Noem sought to place the responsibility on Mullin instead, saying the purchase was “finalized” under his leadership.

Contracting records show that the size of the contract increased by $303 million on the day that Mullin was sworn in as secretary.

The agency said that the idle 737 passenger jets had been undergoing maintenance checks, and that there were plans for two of them to begin deportation flights later this month.

The situation with the planes was reminiscent of the department’s about-face on a plan to acquire warehouses to hold detainees. The department spent heavily on those when Noem was secretary, but reversed itself just months later under Mullin. The department is now giving away or selling seven warehouses that it bought for more than $700 million.

A letter sent to the department Wednesday by Democratic Sens. Patty Murray of Washington and Christopher Murphy of Connecticut, who sit on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said Homeland Security officials had already conceded to the committee that most of the planes would not be used for deportations.

“The American people deserve a full accounting of this gross misuse of their tax dollars,” the letter, which was reviewed by the Times, said.

The senators asked for details about the purchase price of each plane and how they would be used.

Federal law generally requires government agencies to seek competing bids before awarding a contract, to ensure taxpayers get the best deal. But the department sidestepped that requirement for the planes contract, by invoking an exemption for cases of “unusual and compelling urgency.”

That exemption can be used only when delaying the contract would result in “serious injury, financial or other,” to the government. Historically, it has been used during natural disasters, war, and the coronavirus pandemic.

The department declined to answer questions about what serious injury it was trying to prevent. Contracting regulations require agencies to publish the rationales for no-bid contracts, but the department refused to release this one, saying it “would compromise national security or create other security risks.”

The department has invoked the urgency exemption to justify more than $29 billion in spending across about 500 contracts awarded during Trump’s second term, according to an analysis of federal data by the Times. Much of that total came from border wall spending. Urgency claims were also used to justify projects like the $220 million in media contracts awarded to firms tied to Noem and her allies, scrutiny over which contributed to her ouster.

The exemption accounts for nearly two-thirds of the $34 billion that the department has spent on contracts signed in 2026. That’s up sharply from past years. In 2025, the figure was about one-quarter. In 2024, it was less than 1%.

No other major agency has used the exemption for urgency as frequently as Homeland Security, even in an administration that has turned to no-bid contracts repeatedly — for event planning, fountain repair, and the troubled makeover of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

Lorna Tedder, a retired contracting expert who spent more than three decades at the Defense Department, said that, “Some things truly are urgent — people are going to die if you don’t do this.” But if agencies claim the exemption all the time, “it will eventually be abused.”

The contract for the planes was first awarded in late November. At the time, the government was already paying other contractors hundreds of millions to operate a network of charter flights called “ICE Air.”

The immigration agency has chartered about 25,800 flights in Trump’s second term, shuttling immigrants between detention centers domestically and deporting them abroad, mainly to Latin America and the Caribbean, according to the ICE Flight Monitor tracking project at Human Rights First, a nonprofit advocacy group. The department sometimes has 25 or more planes in the air in a day, according to the nonprofit’s tracking.

But at the time, the Homeland Security Department said it still needed its own planes.

Last fall, Tricia McLaughlin, a department spokesperson, told the Washington Post that purchasing the planes would allow “ICE to operate more effectively, including by using more efficient flight patterns.” McLaughlin has since left the agency. The department did not respond directly to a question asking about her comments.

Daedalus, the Arlington, Virginia-based company the government hired to find the planes, had not previously held a federal contract. However, a company spokesperson said it had worked as a subcontractor to other companies evacuating Afghans who had done work for the U.S. government.

Daedalus’ chair is William Walters, a doctor who until 2021 led a State Department office that evacuated Americans from outbreaks of Ebola, COVID-19, and other crises. In 2024, after leaving government, Walters donated $10,000 to a political committee connected to Noem, then the governor of South Dakota.

Last year, with Noem in charge, the agency gave a separate company run by Walters a contract worth nearly $700 million to encourage immigrants to leave the U.S. voluntarily.

A Daedalus spokesperson said that Walters was unaware that the political committee was tied to Noem.

Daedalus declined to say how much each of the 10 planes had cost, or what its profit margin was for acting, essentially, as a broker. It provided a written statement that it was proud to provide “the best value to the American taxpayer.”

One of the planes is a Boeing 737 luxury jet, now painted in the color scheme of Trump’s new Air Force One. Two others are smaller Gulfstream business jets, each seating about 14 people.

Those planes flew only sporadically after the agency acquired them, according to flight records from airplanes.live, an independent flight tracking service. And the department soon moved to jettison two of them to other agencies, according to the account from Senate Democrats and the internal document reviewed by the Times.

One of the luxury jets “has already been leased to the FBI for 12 months to support director Patel’s travel — despite the fact that the FBI already has its own jets to support the director’s travel,” the Senate Democrats wrote.

The FBI confirmed that it is using one of the Gulfstream jets, saying it was paying the Homeland Security Department significantly less than it had paid a private company to lease a similar plane and that the aircraft was being used to support a range of agency operations, in addition to Patel’s travel.

The Homeland Security Department also wanted to lend the larger Boeing luxury jet to the Pentagon, according to the senators’ letter and the internal document. But a Pentagon spokesperson said no agreement had been signed.

One Gulfstream jet will remain with Homeland Security, for the use of its top leaders, according to the letter.

The other 737s seemed more suited for deportation flights. Flight records show they had been in active use by Avelo Airlines, a low-cost carrier that also flew charter flights for ICE.

But when the government bought them, it parked them.

Daedalus said that two were used briefly to evacuate Americans from the Middle East at the outbreak of the Iran war in early March.

Senate Democrats said they were told by Homeland Security staff that four of the 737s were no longer expected to fly detained immigrants. The senators said the department said it would use them to fly members of Congress on overseas trips, a job now handled by commercial carriers or military aircraft.

For the long term, the agency said it needs a contractor to provide crews and mechanics to operate its new fleet. A recent solicitation said that contract would start next summer.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Four days after Alex Pretti was fatally shot while filming officers taking part in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota, the Homeland Security Department quietly opened an investigation at its office in St. Paul.

The target was not the Border Patrol agents who had killed Pretti, a 37-year-old government nurse, in late January. Instead, it was several left-leaning political organizations — labor unions, a climate change group, socialist collectives — that investigators believed had provided help and money to what they described as the “violent opportunists and agitators” on the street, according to newly released government documents.

As part of their inquiry, the documents show, Homeland Security officials used an array of invasive tactics during the first half of this year to gather information on many groups and individuals who were never accused of crimes, crossing the line that has traditionally stood between investigating criminal activity and political dissent.

In one instance, officials used administrative subpoenas to obtain more than three years of financial records from the Sunrise Movement, an environmental action group, and a labor union, the Communications Workers of America. That time frame went well beyond the civil unrest in Minnesota, which was prompted by the deployment of thousands of immigration agents to the state during the winter.

In another, investigators scrutinized three years’ worth of wire transfers made by the nation’s biggest healthcare workers union, the Service Employees International Union, in what they referred to as an inquiry into “domestic terrorist financing.”

The documents further detailed an expansive covert surveillance operation in which undercover agents spied on protesters and organizers at meetings held online, as well as in libraries, parks, and churches, taking down not only what they said, but also their names and sometimes license plate numbers. The undercover agents also infiltrated group chats on Signal, listening as activists discussed coming demonstrations and their political opinions.

So far, none of the organizations targeted by the Homeland Security inquiry, conducted with the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota, have faced charges. And yet, as the investigation moved forward, prosecutors showed grand jurors a PowerPoint slide asserting that 18 groups — including the AFL-CIO, the country’s largest federation of labor unions — were part of a conspiracy to impede the work of immigration officers in Minnesota.

Ultimately, that supposed conspiracy led in June to the indictment of 15 people accused of interfering with law enforcement agents as members of the far-left movement known as antifa.

The Homeland Security Department did not respond to a message seeking comment. A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota declined to answer questions about the investigative tactics.

By its own account, the institutional left in Minnesota, especially the labor movement, played a central role in bringing out hundreds of thousands of people to march in protest of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown in the state. But the demonstrations — and corresponding efforts to monitor the movements of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents — were largely undertaken by ordinary residents, most of whom have said they were committed to peaceful resistance.

“While federal agents repeatedly broke the law, ordinary people exercised their First Amendment rights to protect their neighbors,” said Aru Shiney-Ajay, the executive director of the Sunrise Movement. “The Trump administration is now trying to intimidate individuals and organizations who opposed his agenda.”

Some of the 15 people charged in the so-called antifa case did, in fact, belong to some of the unions and political organizations that faced scrutiny over several months during the spring and winter. But the newly released documents, which were disclosed as part of a motion asking for more details about the criminal inquiry, suggest that investigators used those tenuous connections to take a deep dive into the inner workings of the groups.

Kevin Riach, the lawyer who filed the motion, in U.S. District Court in Minnesota, wrote that the Homeland Security investigation into the interference with federal agents “extended far beyond any potential threat to law enforcement safety.”

“It concluded, with no evidence (but obvious political animus),” he wrote, “that numerous Twin Cities unions and nonprofit organizations were involved in a widespread conspiracy,” adding that “it surveilled and surreptitiously gathered financial records generated by these organizations despite the lack of any connection between those organizations and criminal conduct.”

The investigation in some ways called to mind Cointelpro, the intrusive counterintelligence program that the FBI ran against leftist groups from the 1950s to the 1970s under the leadership of the bureau’s director, J. Edgar Hoover.

The Minnesota surveillance reports in particular documented what largely appeared to be political activity protected by the First Amendment. They showed how undercover agents embedded themselves in a “noise protest” outside a hotel where immigration agents were staying and took down notes at other gatherings as demonstrators brainstormed ideas on how to protest the surge of officers who descended on Minnesota late last year.

Former federal prosecutors questioned why Homeland Security officials took the lead in a case that would typically be overseen by the FBI. Others said that the broad use of subpoenas targeting labor unions and other groups was unusual and concerning, especially if it turns out there was no evidence that the organizations were breaking the law.

“The government’s power to investigate is extraordinary, and with that power comes a responsibility to exercise care and restraint,” said Harry Jacobs, who resigned as the chief of the criminal division at the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota in January in protest over the Trump administration’s handling of the killing of Renee Good.

“An investigation should begin with a legitimate basis to suspect criminal conduct, not with a chosen institution or group,” Jacobs added. “Prosecutors must follow the facts and the law wherever they lead, rather than select a target and work backwards to build a case.”

Several of the groups that were targeted in the inquiry, known as Operation Puppet Master, and in a follow-up investigation called Project Whipple Shield, declined to comment. (Whipple Shield is a reference to the Whipple Building, which served as a hub of the immigration operation.)

When Daniel N. Rosen, the top federal prosecutor in Minnesota, announced the indictment of the 15 purported antifa members two months ago, he chose his words carefully, insisting that the defendants had been charged only because each of them had “violently opposed” federal agents taking part in the Trump administration’s immigration agenda.

“Be assured,” he told reporters, “the Department of Justice and my U.S. attorney’s office has and will distinguish between lawful protest and criminal conduct.”

But what Rosen did not disclose that day was that the charges filed against the 15 defendants stemmed from a sprawling investigation. Its tentacles had touched the lives of scores of ordinary people — teachers, veterans, union members — who in many instances had gotten together to do little more than discuss monitoring ICE agents or abolishing ICE altogether.

The case in St. Paul, like others against ICE protesters, arose from a sweeping directive issued last year by Trump known as National Security Presidential Memo 7. The memo ordered a whole-of-government approach to stem what officials have described as a rising tide of left-wing political violence.

But former prosecutors and civil rights lawyers have criticized it for encouraging aggressive investigations and prosecutions of groups and people on the left for activities typically protected by free speech laws.

In drafting their indictment, prosecutors under Rosen focused on an organization called Direct Action Minnesota, or DAMN, an umbrella group that describes itself as a “decentralized coalition of working-class people engaged in various forms of community defense against the current federal occupation” in Minnesota. Prosecutors said that the group trained its members in how to use shields against law enforcement officers, conduct surveillance, plan events, and mount “rapid mass mobilization” against actions by ICE officers.

The indictment details some behavior by protesters with ties to DAMN that clearly seems violent or obstructive.

For example, prosecutors said that on Jan. 23, demonstrators who had gathered at the Whipple Building threw ice blocks at law enforcement vehicles. They also formed a blockade, boxing federal agents into one area near the federal building. Weeks later, prosecutors added, some of the defendants put debris in a road outside the building, trying to block access to it.

But the indictment also notes that the defendants often relied on information gleaned from group chats whose members tracked and monitored vehicles going to and from the Whipple Building — behavior that is not necessarily illegal. Indeed, the federal judge overseeing the case, Katherine M. Menendez, has already issued an order in a separate civil proceeding saying that protesters cannot be arrested simply for following federal agents in their vehicles.

Nonetheless, some groups that organized and ran the group chats were targeted by the surveillance operation and later identified in the prosecutors’ grand jury presentation as being part of the conspiracy to interfere with ICE agents. Other members of the alleged conspiracy were said to include the local chapters of the SEIU and the Democratic Socialists of America, a state teachers union — and even the Grease Pit, a small bike shop in Minneapolis.

In his motion, Riach described how federal agents took down the license plate numbers of people who attended a protest at a church in Roseville, Minn., and used that information to obtain their names. The agents then searched social media for images of the people, compiling an “intel work-up” that included detailed personal information about them.

“None of these individuals did anything other than engage in protected First Amendment speech in a church meeting room,” Riach wrote. “Yet now their personal information is memorialized in a DHS dossier.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

In the week leading up to the Iranian attack Friday that killed two U.S. soldiers and left one service member missing in Jordan, Iran carried out three other strikes against U.S. forces in the country.

Those attacks injured dozens of U.S. service members and damaged several helicopters, according to several U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters.

But the Pentagon did not disclose the earlier strikes, nor the casualties and damage they inflicted.

The episode is the latest example during the Iran conflict of the tension between what the Pentagon says is the need for operational security and the government’s obligation to inform the public about the conduct of the war.

In statements after airstrikes against Iranian military sites last week, U.S. Central Command said it was retaliating for Iran’s attacks against commercial ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz, never mentioning Iran’s strikes on bases in the region, including in Jordan.

Central Command is not required to release information about injured service members, especially when they quickly return to duty, a U.S. military official said.

Moreover, another U.S. military official added, why would the Pentagon divulge information that could help Iran zero in on its deadly ballistic missiles and drone attacks in Jordan and other bases in the Middle East where thousands of U.S. troops are stationed?

Central Command has also stopped announcing how many sites in Iran it hits each day for the same reason, U.S. officials say.

In the days since the collapse of a fragile truce, the Pentagon has provided little information about the U.S. military strategy after nearly five months of war. The last major Pentagon briefing on the war was in early May.

In the past several months, the Trump administration has failed to disclose how the Iran war has drained U.S. supplies of critical, costly weapons, and how Iran retained and rebuilt substantial missile capabilities.

The subject of American casualties in the war is similarly sensitive. The deaths of two Army soldiers in Jordan on Friday and another service member in northern Iraq bring to 17 the total number of U.S. military personnel killed since the United States and Israel launched attacks on Iran on Feb. 28.

The Pentagon’s casualty reporting protocols call for publicly identifying deceased service members only after 24 hours have passed since next of kin were notified. The names of troops wounded in action are not typically released.

In a statement on Saturday, Central Command said four U.S. service members wounded in Friday’s attack were taken to Jordanian hospitals and had been discharged. More U.S. troops received minor injuries and had returned to duty, the statement said, but it did not specify how many.

And the statement did not mention service members injured in the three previous attacks in Jordan last week.

In a brief phone call with NewsNation, President Donald Trump said the troops died “in service of our country” and reiterated the war’s primary goal of “never allowing Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on social media on Saturday that the loss of the two U.S. soldiers would stiffen American resolve.

More than 400 U.S. service members have been injured in the Iran conflict, according to Central Command. The Pentagon had periodically reported the total number of service members injured and returned to duty since early in the war, but it has stopped updating the overall figure in recent weeks.

In previous administrations, the Pentagon usually delayed providing any details on injured service members until family notifications were completed. During the Biden administration, the Pentagon typically reported the number of service members injured in attacks by Iran-backed militias on U.S. bases in Syria and Iraq.

More than 1,700 Iranian civilians have died in the war, according to estimates.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.