Noem’s Scandal-Hit Deportation Contractor Handed $200M Extension Despite Criminal Probe
EXCLUSIVE: A federal contractor that critics say gamed its way to a near-billion-dollar self-deportation deal has quietly been handed another massive sum by Markwayne Mullin’s DHS.
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The scandal-plagued contractor at the center of a criminal corruption probe into Kristi Noem’s Department of Homeland Security has received a $200 million six-month extension—even as it fails to deliver, PunchUp and the Daily Beast can reveal.
Salus Worldwide Solutions won a three-year, $915 million contract in May 2025 to run Project Homecoming—the Donald Trump administration’s much-trumpeted flagship self-deportation program—even though it was founded just two years earlier and had never worked as a lead contractor for the government before.
DHS’s own contracting officer and in-house legal team concluded the award had “an appearance of impropriety”—findings laid bare in a ruling published in May in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. It found DHS held a competition lasting just days with a handpicked pool of vendors and had initially tried to award Salus the work without any competition at all.
Salus’ results on Project Homecoming have been poor, according to publicly available documentation. Its own planning documents projected the removal of 276,000 people in the contract’s first 12 months. Yet a sworn court statement filed in December by a Salus executive showed that as of December 1, the government had authorized nearly 35,000 stipends for self-deported individuals—but only 17,406 had been completed.
A Salus spokesman said the number was now higher but failed to provide any evidence. DHS was given two weeks to respond but did not return any figures.
The company is now subject to congressional investigations, and its name has surfaced in a DHS Inspector General criminal probe into alleged kickbacks to Lewandowski, 52—the chief adviser to and alleged lover of former Homeland Security Secretary Noem, 54—in exchange for securing government contracts.
Despite all this, DHS handed Salus a $200 million extension just three days after the contract’s base year expired on May 19, according to federal spending records reviewed by PunchUp and the Beast, our sister outlet.
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