Noem’s Scandal-Hit $1 Billion Deportation Failure Faces the Ax
EXCLUSIVE: Salus has burned through its money, lost the boudoir jet contract, and faces a fight to continue running the troubled Project Homecoming.
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The scandal-hit contractor running Donald Trump’s flagship $1 billion self-deportation program blew through nearly all its money with poor results and now faces being stripped of the work entirely, multiple sources have told PunchUp.
Salus Worldwide Solutions—the firm named in a wider criminal corruption probe into contracts issued during Kristi Noem’s disaster-hit tenure as Homeland Security secretary—was handed a $200 million, six-month lifeline in May to keep Project Homecoming flying, as we reported last Friday.
Run by Trump crony William Walters III, a former State Department surgeon, Salus has been awarded a total of $1.1 billion in federal contracts, even though it was founded just two years earlier and had never served as a lead contractor for the government.
But that extension runs only through November, even though Salus had been contracted on a one-year base deal with the option of two further single years. Now DHS—under Noem’s replacement, Markwayne Mullin, 48—is on the verge of throwing the contract out to full and open competition, sources say, who add that Salus is “unlikely” to win the contract back.
This process is about “finding a way to un-fuck the entire mess,” one person with intimate knowledge of the contracting process told PunchUp. “The full and open competition is the only way for DHS to save face.”
Our well-placed administration insiders have claimed that White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller—said to have been “blindsided” by the appointment of Mullin’s old Oklahoma trooper buddy Richard “Lance” Schroyer as ICE director—“may be getting boxed out of” Trump’s inner circle, with the scheme increasingly viewed inside the administration as an expensive failure, as we reported Monday.
Internal Salus planning documents, which were shared with DHS before the contract’s extension, lay bare just how close to the edge the program has been run. A burn-rate dashboard dated May 7 projected the operation would hit “burnout”—the point at which it runs out of money—on May 26, with just 13 operational days left and $38.85 million remaining against a daily spend of $2.7 million.
By that point, the company had already invoiced $433.57 million in roughly a year, with another $58.78 million in accounts receivable and $25.29 million in activity still pending an invoice.
The same documents, which have been reviewed by PunchUp, show why the money has drained so fast. Salus had nearly 19,500 in stipends, worth almost $51 million, sitting uncollected. It stated that almost 67,000 people who had signed up for the process would need to be informed if Project Homecoming were to be suspended altogether.
Insiders have told us that stipends often go uncollected because “there is a definite mistrust of the federal government and the idea that the stipend payments are actually real,” and there is no way to enforce their collection. Some migrants are thought to believe that being signed up to the scheme might help their cases if they are ever detained.
With money fast running out, DHS granted Salus the $200 million six-month extension three days after the contract’s base year expired on May 19.
Project Homecoming’s results don’t match its cost. Salus’ own planning documents, revealed during a court hearing in April, projected 276,000 removals in the contract’s first year. But a separate December court declaration from a company executive put the real figure far lower: of nearly 35,000 stipends authorized as of December 1, just 17,406 had been completed.
A Salus spokesman previously told us the number was now higher, but failed to provide any evidence. DHS has also been given more than two weeks to provide up-to-date figures, but has not done so.
The spokesman said, “Salus Worldwide Solutions stands behind the humane and dignified support that it has provided to over 120,000 people that have chosen to take the Assisted Voluntary Departure pathway at a cost savings to the American taxpayer of over $2.2 billion when compared to involuntary deportation in our first year of operations.”
A person with intimate knowledge of the contract told PunchUp that the coming re-competition is designed to clean up a mess DHS created itself. Rival contractor CSI Aviation, the chartered deportation flight operator that lost out when Salus was handed the work, sued the department over the award last year, arguing the contract was rushed through without proper competition.
Court records in the CSI case show DHS personnel shared nonpublic details of the contract’s budget and specifications with Salus before the bid, and that the work was opened to bidding for just two business days—a window CSI called “impossibly short.”
Mother Jones has since reported that Christopher Pratt—the DHS official who oversaw the contract award, himself a former colleague of Salus founder Walters from their time together at the State Department—held off-site meetings at Salus’ offices before the deal landed, and personally congratulated Walters once it had. Pratt did not respond to a request for comment.
The May court opinion in the CSI case adds weight to questions surrounding the procurement. Proceedings revealed DHS’s own contracting officer and general counsel concluded the department’s dealings with Salus had “created an appearance of impropriety.” The judge tossed the suit only because CSI couldn’t show it was eligible to bid. He never ruled on whether the deal was clean—writing he’d seen no evidence of “bad faith,” even as he flagged “concerns” about how DHS appeared to have run it.
Salus is now caught up in multiple congressional investigations. House Oversight Democrats, led by Ranking Member Robert Garcia, 47, have written to Walters seeking records, and Senators Richard Blumenthal and Peter Welch have pressed Mullin for information about Lewandowski’s role in contracting. Separately, the DHS Inspector General has opened a broad investigation into how contracts were solicited and handled under Noem and Lewandowski, though the watchdog will not confirm which contracts are in scope.
Salus’ name has surfaced in the underlying allegations; according to congressional letters and NBC News reporting, a Salus representative allegedly told a marketing firm it needed to “make sure we are properly thanking the person who gave it to us” to win a $20 million DHS contract—a reference understood by the outlet to mean Lewandowski. Salus and Lewandowski have both denied wrongdoing.
“DHS made a bunch of errors in the original solicitation under Noem, as we know,” one of PunchUp’s sources said, describing the allegations leveled at both Salus and the department. “Their own internal contracts team made their concerns known.”
The department first signaled a retreat from Salus may be on the cards roughly four months ago. Government lawyers told the judge at a Feb. 5 hearing in the CSI case that DHS might not exercise the contract’s “option years”—the extensions supposed to carry Salus through its full three-year term—and that it intended to re-solicit the work through full and open competition. DHS told the court in a Feb. 19 filing that it “cannot commit to foregoing exercise of the option years.”
Mullin appears to have prolonged the flip-flop, extending the contract by six months and $200 million in May. Multiple sources say that now, just over a month after throwing Salus a lifeline, the secretary will force the firm to bid on a level playing field against rivals for the first time.
“Salus will have competition—something they hate,” a source at the company said, with a government procurement source explaining that the company would now likely face an Independent Government Cost Estimate, or IGCE.
“This is when the government hires a company completely separate to determine what the requirement should cost, versus having a [company] like Salus shove this current mess down their throats,” the source said. “Once this is done, anyone who bids will have to come in close to the IGCE. The numbers are never published.”
It is a telling detail. As PunchUp has reported, a key criticism of the original award was that no proper independent cost estimate was ever done—meaning DHS had no benchmark to judge whether Salus’ prices were reasonable. An IGCE would end that.
The contracting source laid out the wider reckoning Salus would face if forced to compete and win on normal terms.
“They will be required to implement a bunch of steps required by all government contractors: compliance monitoring, an approved accounting system, and published rates for labor.
“They will be subject to having a government technical monitor assigned to the program. That person will sit in their spaces and monitor everything they do. They will be audited by the government every year. And they will have to use an approved subcontractor plan—no more hiring a bunch of companies all owned by Will Walters.”
And the source added that when the government conducts its independent cost estimate, it will be able to see how much Walters and his Salus colleagues have personally profited from both this contract and previous work with the state department. “Walters sells his work as high risk on his part, but he has personally profited very handsomely,” they said.
Walters built the company’s contracting structure around a web of his own entities—a structure that an approved subcontracting plan could dismantle.
The signs that DHS has soured on Salus go beyond Project Homecoming. The company has already lost control of one of the most notorious assets in its empire—a $108 million Boeing 737 MAX business jet, fitted with a queen-sized bed, that Noem leased before she was fired and that Trump has since made available to first lady Melania Trump and other leading Trumpworld figures.
As PunchUp revealed, DHS transferred operational control of that aircraft from a Salus subsidiary to its arch-rival CSI in May.
DHS also acquired a fleet of eight Boeing 737s and two Gulfstream jets through Daedalus Aviation, another Walters company, and sold the deal internally as a government-owned deportation airline. The aircraft arrived between January and March of this year and were then parked at a maintenance facility in Louisiana, where they sat idle for months without embarking on a single deportation flight.
Losing the boudoir jet to the very firm that sued over the original award, and that DHS is now lining up to bid against it, is a humiliation that tells its own story about where Salus stands inside the department.
None of this is how Salus tells it. The company, which has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, says the process was clean and the savings real. “As the United States Court of Federal Claims found, and what has been the case all along — the contracting process was fair, legal, without political interference, and competitive,” a spokesperson said previously, adding that Salus is “proud to support DHS in carrying out Project Homecoming” while “saving over $2 billion dollars” for the taxpayer.
The DHS said it regularly reviews contracts and did not deny that Salus’ future was under consideration.
“DHS has not sunset its contract with Salus,” a spokesman said. “Under the leadership of President Trump, the State Department has obligated $500 million for Project Homecoming to promote and incentivize self-deportation. The contract supporting Project Homecoming was adjudicated through established acquisition policies and procedures in accordance with federal law.
“As good stewards of American taxpayer dollars, DHS regularly reviews contracts to identify waste, fraud, and abuse. Under new leadership, we are reviewing many previous contracts and to ensure we are delivering effectively and efficiently on the President’s agenda.
“Since January 2025, 2.2 million illegal aliens have voluntarily self-deported and over 100,000 have used the app. DHS has been consistently clear that those who have used the CBP Home app and utilized Project Homecoming are but a fraction of those who have voluntarily left the country because illegal aliens know President Trump is enforcing our immigration laws.
“The Trump administration continues to pursue cost-effective and innovative approaches to deliver on the American people’s mandate for the removal of criminal illegal aliens.”
PunchUp contacted the White House and Lewandowski’s representative for comment. A White House official said Miller “has zero input or insight into any DHS contracts and was not aware about any conversations regarding this contract.” Lewandowski’s reps did not respond.
This vile woman needs to be held accountable and jailed for her crimes