BREAKING: Eastern Airlines gets contract to fly DHS 'deportation fleet'

ICE charter airline Eastern Air Express, a subsidiary of Eastern Airlines, has been awarded a contract to operate a fleet of passenger jets acquired by the Department of Homeland Security to conduct deportation and removal flights.

The contract, worth up to $327 million, is for the Kansas City-based airline to provide "operational support for aircraft and maintenances services" for "government furnished aircraft" from DHS and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

As previously reported here and elsewhere, DHS has acquired at least 10 planes in recent months that it has claimed will be used for its own "deportation fleet," via a shady contractor with ties to former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and a MAGA think tank.

Seven of the jets are Boeing 737s sold by Avelo Airlines starting in late December of last year, which an Avelo source told me at the time were purchased for an enormous sum in order to rush the sale.

The other three planes – a luxury Boeing Business Jet that became the subject of much speculation leading up to Noem's "reassignment," and two Gulfstream 650 business jets – were also acquired by shell companies connected to the same contractor.

Despite the contractor's effort to hire crew for the planes, they've mostly been parked in Dallas and Lake Charles, LA, save for a brief burst of activity in March when they were used to repatriate Americans stranded in the Middle East after Trump's attack on Iran.

So earlier this summer, DHS posted a statement of work asking contractors to submit information on how they would operate the planes, conduct maintenance and provide logistical support for the fleet. In addition to deportation and removal flights, voluntary return flights, rapid response and senior leadership travel.

In July, I wrote this piece about Bloomberg's coverage of the statement of work.

This new contract appears to be the award resulting from that statement of work.

Eastern Airlines and Eastern Air Express were cobbled together in recent years from parts of the corpses of other airlines – namely, Dynamic Airways, Hillwood Airways, and iAero/Swift Air, whose ICE flights in Trump's first term were notorious for their myriad safety issues – plus the strategic acquisition of the trademark for the legendary Eastern Air Lines, which shut down in 1991.

Their parent company, Eastern Air Holdings, is privately held by about 40 shareholders, according to 2025 Department of Transportation documents. The largest shareholder, with a 42 percent stake, is former Brigham Young University professor and Extra Space Storage founder Kenneth M. Woolley.

Eastern and Eastern Air Express operated 26 percent of all ICE flights in July, totaling 555 flights, according to analysis of public flight data by the ICE Flight Monitor at Human Rights First.

Of ICE's current stable of charter flight providers, only Eastern Air Express operates 737s, the same jets in DHS's fleet.

While most of the company's business has come from ICE for years, it has shown signs recently that it wanted to expand that business even more. In May, Eastern operated its first ICE flight to Africa, something no other large-jet carrier but Omni Air International has been willing to do going back at least a decade. That flight, which I wrote about here, delivered third-country nationals to Cameroon and Ghana.

On July 31, Eastern conducted another ICE mission to Africa, delivering dozens of third-country nationals to Central African Republic, Ghana, and Sierra Leone.

Tracking All of Trump's Known Third-Country Removals

What about the plan for foreign camps?

In an alarming subplot to the whole "deportation fleet" scandal was a little-noticed paragraph in the original solicitation, first reported by Charles R. Davis at The Redoubt, asking the contractor to help establish "international staging areas" in "host nations" that could hold up to 1,000 "illegal aliens." It also referred to these staging areas as "detention centers" and the migrants as "detainees," raising alarms that ICE's concentration camps may be expanding to include foreign gulags.

Concentration camp expert Andrea Pitzer echoed this alarm in her essay "Little Gitmos Everywhere," calling the solicitation a "tremendous escalation."

"After a decade of writing about this long arc, my sense is that what the U.S. is now proposing represents a significant shift that will open doors to horrors both new and familiar," she wrote.

So, does the contract awarded to Eastern include establishing the foreign camps? We don't know. The award as currently posted is bare bones and simply doesn't say. I have asked Eastern for comment about this specifically and will update this story if and when we know more.

Thank you for reading. I am a former Washington Post staff writer, and as far as I know, I’m the only journalist in America covering ICE flights full time. I am committed to keeping this reporting non-paywalled, but if you are able, please sign up for a paid subscription or send me a one-time tip, so I can continue this important work. –Gillian