President Donald Trump has decided to hang on to the controversial $70 million luxury jet leased by former Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem until she was ousted last month, according to a report.
The plane will now be made available to first lady Melania Trump and to cabinet secretaries, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Paperwork indicated that Noem intended to purchase the Boeing 737 Max 8 – which features a queen-size bed, showers, a kitchen, four flat screen TVs, and a cocktail bar – for use in carrying out “high-profile deportations.”
While it had been assumed the purchase would be abandoned following her departure, the administration has pressed ahead with it, taking responsibility for the plane away from the Department of Homeland Security and redesignating it for more general use.
A DHS spokesperson said of its permanent acquisition: “This aircraft will be available to cabinet members who need secure command and control and rapid long-range mobility.”
The existence of the plane, which is thought to be more luxurious than Air Force Two in which Vice President JD Vance travels, proved unpopular with some immigration hardliners outside of government, who felt it was inappropriate for the job with which Noem had been tasked.
“Wasting tens of millions of dollars on a luxury jet that won’t remove a single illegal alien is offensive,” said RJ Hauman, director of the National Immigration Center for Enforcement, a lobby group that has been pushing the Trump administration to go further to realize its mass deportation goals.
The cost of the plane has also been an issue for critics, with Marc Short, who served as chief of staff to Trump’s first VP Mike Pence, pointing out that the president’s second term “started with promises of cutting wasteful spending” through Elon Musk’s DOGE outfit only to end up with an additional multi-million dollar jet on the books.
Noem was removed by the president in March after 13 months in a role that had seen her become the face of the administration’s illegal immigration crackdown and been roundly mocked online as the “ICE Barbie” because of her penchant for costume changes to match her backdrop.
She was demoted to a new role as Special Envoy for The Shield of the Americas and former Oklahoma Republican senator Markwayne Mullin was swiftly sworn in as her replacement.
The president had reportedly grown weary of the “constant chaos” surrounding Noem’s department and over the negative press coverage she had attracted through the botched handling of Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis in January.
Two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were shot dead in the snowy streets of the Minnesota city by federal immigration agents whose actions they were protesting and then smeared by the former secretary, who falsely accused them of being “domestic terrorists” and then refused to apologize.
The WSJ published a bombshell report in February in which Noem was accused of engaged in an extramarital affair with her top adviser, Corey Lewandowski, which both parties vehemently denied, seeking to “burnish her personal stardom at every turn,” sparring with border czar Tom Homan, and firing – and then rehiring – a pilot after her comfort blanket was left behind on a plane.
Trump was also “incensed” by her claim during a congressional hearing that he had known in advance about Noem signing off on a $220 million TV ad campaign for ICE in which she appeared on horseback before Mount Rushmore.
“I never knew anything about it,” he fumed to Reuters shortly before announcing her exit.
She left office reportedly feeling she had been “thrown under the bus” by the president but the news left DHS staffers “actually crying out of happiness,” according to The Washington Examiner.
Noem has not been free from scandal since leaving the DHS, with reports subsequently emerging about her husband, Byron Noem, indulging a taste for cross-dressing and sending out compromising photos and cash to strangers online as part of a “bimbofication” fetish, allegations by which she was said to have been “blindsided.”
