A former deputy to outgoing Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem saddled the department with millions of dollars in wasted funding for vehicles that cannot be used.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials are stashing away hundreds of pickup trucks and SUVs emblazoned with the agency’s name, logo and motto, which agents say will hinder their efforts to apprehend undocumented migrants, reported the Washington Examiner.
“ICE has never had marked vehicles,” said a source familiar with the purchases. “In talking to people, they’re like, ‘We don’t want to use these, we can’t.’”
DHS has claimed that assaults against ICE personnel have shot up by 8,000 percent, a figure used to justify agents wearing masks while on duty or swapping out license plates on rental vehicles they use on patrols.
But former ICE deputy director Madison Sheahan placed a bulk order for clearly marked trucks that won’t be used.
“If leadership would have been consulted — leadership being the executive assistant directors, do you need marked vehicles, the people that have done this job would have said, ‘We don’t need marked vehicles, because you’re not going to use them,’” the first source said.
The GOP’s One Big, Beautiful Bill allocated $170 billion over four years for border security and immigration enforcement, and ICE announced in November that it would spend $2.25 million to buy 25 Chevrolet Tahoes wrapped in the agency’s logo. The Chevy contract was given to GOP donor Rick Hendrick, owner of Hendrick Motorsports in North Carolina.
The order was not completed, the Examiner reported, which means that other companies were not permitted to offer proposals and prices to fulfill the order. An additional $174,000 to $230,000 was paid to three companies to wrap the vehicles with ICE branding.
The 28-year-old Sheahan graduated from Ohio State in 2019 and left ICE in January to run for Congress in Ohio. Sources told the Examiner that Noem and DHS special government employee Corey Lewandowski signed off on her purchase order of the marked vehicles.
“I absolutely think I’m qualified for the job,” Sheahan said last year when questioned about her lack of credentials. “Because at the end of the day, what really makes anybody qualified for any job?”
However, sources familiar with the plan say ICE career officials would not have approved of the purchase beforehand if they had been consulted, because driving identifiable vehicles goes against protocol.
“It’s ridiculous because you don’t want to advertise what you’re doing,” the first person said. “We’re just hiding them in a parking garage somewhere because we don’t want to drive them. Who wants to drive the marked vehicles?”
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