In the seven months that passed since Donald Trump was inaugurated for his second term in the White House, the new administration has supercharged a deportation campaign that targeted more than 10 million undocumented individuals living in the United States.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers have been conducting raids in workplaces, traffic stops, university campuses and immigration hearings while also cooperating with carriers like Avelo Airlines to then transport migrants to countries such as Columbia, El Salvador, Mexico, India and Brazil among others.
The Houston-based carrier that doubles as a low-cost commercial airline and government contractor had been running deportation flights under past administrations but is now facing increasing protests given the increasingly aggressive and at times extrajudicial nature of the detentions taking place under Trump.
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Kristi Noem struggles to find enough planes to meet deportation goals, looks to buy some
As sources with knowledge of the matter first told NBC News, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is now leading a push for ICE to buy and operate its own fleet of planes amid increasing challenges to find contractors to conduct deportation flights at the rate that the administration would like.
Trump had previously vowed to remove as many as one million migrants per year during his campaign and, according to Biden-era ICE chief of staff Jason Houser, getting to even less than half at 35,000 per month would require the government branch to nearly double the 14 or so planes contracted under the previous administration.
Related: Low-cost airline many take starts running ICE deportation flights
“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,” NBC reports.
Watchdog groups tracking deportation flights found that ICE chartered 1,000 flights in July at the $25,000-per-hour market rate. The cost of an average commercial aircraft is usually in the tens of millions of dollars but any efforts to shift deportation flights from chartering to independent operations would also come with additional challenges around making sure they meet FAA standards as well as staffing the pilots and other crew to run them.
With the budget bill that the Republican-led Congress passed last July, the Noem-led department may have the budget to do this as the annual funds allocated to ICE have been increased by nearly tenfold from $9.5 to $75 billion for the coming fiscal year.
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Airlines that take on deportation flights face increasing scrutiny, protests
Independent carriers that choose to take on government contracts for deportation flights have, meanwhile, faced increasing scrutiny from both their customers and various watchdogs on the internet.
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Avelo has faced protests in states as diverse as Arizona, Oregon, New York, Washington, Connecticut and North Carolina among others while, in May 2025, hackers took over the website of aircraft leasing company GlobalX and updated the front page to inform those who came to it that the operator was running deportation flights for ICE.
“Anonymous has decided to enforce the Judge’s order since you and your sycophant staff ignore lawful orders that go against your fascist plans,” the group published on GlobalX’s front page in reference to U.S. District Court Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr. ruling that Trump could not use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport migrants to Venezuela.
Related: I went inside the plane running the longest flight in the world
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