CRACKS IN THE ICE

Mullin Faces Demand to Ax ICE Barbie’s $1BN Scandal-Hit Failure

Pressure is mounting to scrap a lucrative contract awarded by Kristi Noem.

A top Democrat is calling for the Trump administration to immediately cancel a billion-dollar self-deportation deal following a series of revelations about the scandal-ridden scheme.

Rep. Bennie Thompson, 78, a ranking member and former chair of the House Committee on Homeland Security, has written to Secretary Markwayne Mullin, 48, demanding that DHS ax its $915 million Project Homecoming contract with Salus Worldwide Solutions, the Daily Beast’s sister investigative Substack PunchUp reports.

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The scheme gives migrants $2,600 and a flight home to deport themselves. The department handed out the deal in May 2025 under then-Secretary Kristi Noem, 54, before quietly topping it up with a $200 million extension this May on Mullin’s watch, three days after its base year expired. Trump, 80, fired Noem on March 5 over a slew of scandals throughout her tenure.

“You must take immediate action to stop this wasteful and corrupt spending,” Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, wrote in his letter on July 10, which was first reported on Tuesday by Mother Jones. Six of the letter’s nine footnotes point to stories on the scandal published by PunchUp and the Daily Beast.

As PunchUp reported on June 26, DHS’s own contracting officer and in-house lawyers concluded that the Salus award carried “an appearance of impropriety.” Those findings were laid bare in a May ruling by the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in a lawsuit brought by rival contractor CSI Aviation, which claimed it was unfairly denied the opportunity to bid on the deal.

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The proceedings showed that the department first tried to award Salus the near-billion-dollar deal without any competition. It then opened bidding for just two business days to a handpicked pool of vendors, a window CSI branded “impossibly short.”

The judge tossed the suit only because CSI couldn’t show it was entitled to bid. He never ruled on whether the deal was clean, writing that his review “did not yield any evidence of bad faith or unfair dealings” even as he flagged concerns over how DHS ran the process.

Salus founder William Walters III, a Trump crony and former State Department surgeon, had never led a federal contract before Trump returned to office. The previous month, Walters had donated thousands to Noem’s political action committee, a fact cited in Thompson’s letter. That PAC paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to Noem’s corruption-acccused chief adviser and rumored lover, Corey Lewandowski, 52, who has denied any wrongdoing.

Thompson’s complaint also noted that Walters previously worked with Christopher Pratt, the DHS policy chief who helped roll out Project Homecoming, according to an investigation by Mother Jones and POGO. Internal DHS records reviewed by PunchUp show Pratt scheduled off-site meetings at Salus’ offices before the award and personally congratulated Walters once the deal landed. His White House nomination for a top State Department post was pulled in late September.

Pratt did not immediately respond to an email sent to his lawyer, Chris Kachouroff, who had previously told us that the Mother Jones article “contains materially false and defamatory statements” but did not specify which statements were false and defamatory.

Thompson also says Walters has launched more than two dozen companies profiting from taxpayers. They include the firms behind a luxury Boeing 737 Max 8, also known as the “Mile-High Boudoir Jet,” that DHS first acquired for Noem and which Mullin now uses to travel, along with six 737 MAX deportation planes, as the Beast reported in March.

Walters has since been stripped of the contract for those jets and looks likely to be forced to recompete for the Project Homecoming deal. PunchUp revealed on June 30 that Mullin’s $200 million, six-month contract extension came despite Salus having burned through all of its money with poor results, delivering just 17,406 self-deportations against a first-year target of 276,000.

Salus has surfaced in a DHS inspector general criminal probe into whether Lewandowski took kickbacks for steering federal contracts. According to congressional letters and NBC News reporting, a Salus representative allegedly told a marketing firm that it needed to “make sure we are properly thanking the person who gave it to us” regarding a $20 million DHS contract—understood to mean Lewandowski. Salus has repeatedly denied any illegality or impropriety.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday that investigators had found evidence that Lewandowski may have been involved in improperly awarding government deals. He has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.

Thompson blasted Mullin for extending the Salus contract in his letter to the secretary, writing that “this decision, made entirely under your leadership, is incomprehensible.” He warned that public confidence in DHS stewardship of taxpayer funds has been “severely diminished—if not completely eroded.” He added that if Mullin won’t kill the contract outright, any future award must, at a minimum, go through “full and open competition.”

Mullin has already told Thompson’s committee that his hands are tied. The secretary said at a June 3 hearing that he had canceled most unsigned Noem-era deals but insisted that signed contracts can only be scrapped if the DHS inspector general finds they were “falsely signed under false circumstances.”

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Thompson rejected that logic in a separate letter last month, writing DHS must not treat its watchdog as the “sole or exclusive mechanism” for catching procurement fraud.

The lawmaker’s latest demands cap months of congressional heat on Salus. House Oversight Democrats, led by Rep. Robert Garcia, 47, wrote to Walters twice in April, warning Lewandowski “may have used his position… to enrich himself” by extracting kickbacks from contractors, and seeking Salus records. Democratic senators twice demanded in March that the firm preserve its record of dealings with the Noem adviser.

Walters’ response has been to attack the journalists reporting on the contract, and Thompson, claiming both were being driven by larger DHS contractors that he alleges are undermining the Trump administration’s voluntary deportation efforts to improve their bottom line.

A Salus spokesperson claimed in a statement Monday that it was “proud of the humane and dignified support provided to more than 130,000 individuals who voluntarily chose the Assisted Voluntary Departure pathway.” That number is up 10,000 from a statement it sent to us three days earlier.

The company has so far declined to share evidence supporting that claim or to explain the status of those 130,000 people. PunchUp has asked the company to explain the apparent 10,000 increase in just three days.

The spokesperson said Project Homecoming “has generated more than $2.2 billion in savings for the American taxpayer compared to the cost of involuntary deportation,” which requires detaining people, “while treating participants with dignity and professionalism throughout the process.”

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They added, “We stand by our work, our employees, and the measurable results we have delivered. We have no reason to believe that Salus is subject to any investigation by any government body.”

A Homeland Security Committee aide questioned Walters’ claims. “There is nothing ‘humane and dignified’ about helping migrants deport out of fear because DHS ran advertising campaigns threatening to hunt them down,” the aide told Mother Jones. They argued Salus’ savings figures rest on a shaky assumption—that every migrant who left under Project Homecoming would otherwise have been detained, at a cost to house and feed them. “Plus, how many beds is the government already paying for whether in use or not?” the staffer asked.

The Daily Beast has contacted DHS and Salus for comment.

Tom Latchem exposes the secrets, scandals, and stories that powerful people and institutions want to keep under wraps. Follow all of his reporting at PunchUp on Substack.

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