ICE Barbie’s Scandal-Hit Deportation Contractor Handed $200M Extension Despite Criminal Probe

Politics admin June 26, 2026 0 Comments

ICE Barbie’s Scandal-Hit Deportation Contractor Handed $200M Extension Despite Criminal Probe

A contractor under investigation over corruption at Kristi Noem’s Department of Homeland Security has won a $200 million extension despite failing to deliver, the Daily Beast and its investigative Substack PunchUp can reveal.

Salus Worldwide Solutions won a three-year, $915 million contract in May 2025 to run Project Homecoming—the 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.” Those findings were laid bare in a ruling published in May in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. The court 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.

The company’s results have been poor. Its own planning documents projected the removal of 276,000 people in the contract’s first 12 months. But a sworn court statement filed in December by a Salus executive showed that, as of Dec. 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.

Salus is now subject to congressional investigations. Its name has surfaced in a DHS Inspector General criminal probe into alleged kickbacks to Corey Lewandowski, 52—the chief adviser to and alleged lover of Noem, 54—in exchange for securing government contracts.

Despite this, DHS handed Salus the $200 million, six-month extension just three days after the contract’s base year expired on May 19, according to federal spending records reviewed by the Daily Beast and PunchUp.

A spokesperson for Salus, which has repeatedly denied any illegality or impropriety, said the contracting process “was fair, legal, without political interference, and competitive,” and that the government “concluded that Salus had both the best technical approach and the lowest price of any offeror.”

Lewandowski has also denied any impropriety. A source close to him noted that he had left the department 60 days before the extension, and that the decision was made by Markwayne Mullin—Noem’s replacement after Trump fired her in early March.

Salus, founded by former State Department official William Walters III, submitted an unsolicited proposal to DHS just three days after Trump’s inauguration, court documents show. It then spent weeks in private discussions with agency officials—even naming the contract—before DHS ran a compressed competition that Salus won.

The court proceedings stemmed from a lawsuit brought by CSI Aviation, a longtime ICE contractor that claims it was wrongfully shut out. Chief Judge Matthew H. Solomson, a Trump appointee, detailed in a May 12 ruling how DHS’s own investigation found agency personnel had traded emails with Salus before the bid, sharing nonpublic details about the contract’s budget and specifications.

DHS nonetheless issued Salus a waiver, ruling that the pre-bid communications amounted to nothing more than “well-meaning conversations.” As Mother Jones reported in October, the department had originally planned to hand the deal to Salus without competition before opening it to bidding for two business days—a window CSI called “impossibly short.”

Solomson ruled against CSI, finding it had failed to prove it could perform the full scope of the contract, and stopped short of finding bad faith, writing that his examination “did not yield any evidence of bad faith or unfair dealings.”

The DHS division overseeing the contract was run until early September by Christopher Pratt, a former State Department colleague of Walters. Internal DHS records seen by Mother Jones showed Pratt scheduling off-site meetings at Salus’ office before the award and personally congratulating Walters afterward. Pratt’s White House nomination to serve as the State Department’s main liaison to the Pentagon was pulled on Sept. 29.

The corruption allegations surfaced separately. As the Daily Beast reported on March 19, a Salus representative allegedly told officials at a marketing firm: “We are guaranteed this contract, but we need to make sure we are properly thanking the person who gave it to us”—a reference to Lewandowski, sources told NBC News, which first reported the claims.

A lawyer for Salus denied the accounts as “entirely false.” The company threatened to sue NBC in an April 2 letter but never followed up, a company source said. The NBC article remains live.

The DHS inspector general has since opened a criminal investigation into the awarding of $220 million in advertising contracts to separate companies, and Democratic senators have demanded that Salus preserve all communications with Lewandowski.

House Oversight Ranking Member Rep. Robert Garcia, 47, has written to Walters, warning that Lewandowski “may have used his position… to enrich himself while serving as a special government employee by shaking down contractors for kickbacks.”

The Daily Beast and PunchUp contacted DHS and Pratt for comment. A Homeland Security spokesperson said Mullin extended the task order “to ensure the Department can continue administering available voluntary return options,” and that the move “does not alter DHS enforcement authorities, immigration policies, or operational priorities.”

Pratt did not respond.

*For the full article and many more scoops, head over to PunchUp.