A former Trump administration official wasted millions of taxpayer dollars given to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to purchase thousands of employee vehicles that the agency cannot use to arrest illegal immigrants, according to three sources.
ICE’s top brass are quietly searching for a way to amend the remainder of a massive order of pick-up trucks and SUVs that were ordered last year and slated to be wrapped with the agency’s name, logo, and motto, as well as storing away many vehicles that have been delivered to ICE facilities across the country, the Washington Examiner has learned.
“ICE has never had marked vehicles,” the first person familiar with the purchases said in a phone call. “In talking to people, they’re like, ‘We don’t want to use these, we can’t.’”
The saga is the latest controversial expenditure of taxpayer money within the Department of Homeland Security and speaks to the different ways political appointees at the department have tried to approach operations versus how career law enforcement officials have historically done so.
Over the past year, assaults against ICE personnel have risen 8,000%, according to the DHS, and federal police have opted to hide their faces and identities while working in public. They have frequently switched license plates on rental vehicles to avoid detection by activists, who track the license plate numbers of suspected ICE vehicles in massive crowdsourced databases.
Despite the growing number of ways ICE employees have sought to protect their identities, ICE’s former deputy director, Madison Sheehan, placed a bulk order for vehicles clearly marked with ICE’s logo.
We will have our country back.https://t.co/nZkBEj4evQ pic.twitter.com/gYKzwMJV52
— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) August 14, 2025
Now, ICE is trying to figure out how to fix her mistake.
“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 person said.
DHS gives ICE a flashy upgrade
Last August, the DHS and the White House posted photos on social media showing the agency’s newly outfitted pickup trucks and SUVs. It was the first time since ICE’s 2003 inception that the agency had acquired any marked vehicles.
The vehicles were dark navy blue with a red horizontal stripe that runs along each side. ICE’s name and logo adorn the sides in gold lettering, along with “Defend the Homeland” on the rear portion of the sides.
Iced out.
pic.twitter.com/xhexqgmbzS
— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) August 14, 2025
The DHS stated at the time that the “safety and security of our brave men and women is, and always has been, our priority, and suggestions that law enforcement-branded vehicles, no different from police vehicles, will jeopardize that is simply not the case.”
The One Big, Beautiful Bill allocated $170 billion over four years for border security and immigration enforcement.
Last November, the agency said it would spend $2.25 million to buy 25 Chevrolet Tahoes that would be emblazoned with ICE’s new logo and used for recruitment purposes as the agency moved to hire 10,000 new deportation officers following the several vehicles it debuted in August.
The Chevy contract was given to a prominent Republican donor, Rick Hendrick, owner of Hendrick Motorsports in North Carolina. It was not completed, meaning that other companies were not allowed to offer proposals and prices that they could fulfill the order for.
An additional $174,000 to $230,000 was given to three companies to wrap the vehicles in their new markings.
Order placed
The One Big, Beautiful Bill included $29.5 billion for various ICE expenditures, including signing bonuses, recruitment efforts, hiring, onboarding, information technology, facility upgrades, and “fleet modernization.” Vehicles are included in the agency’s funding request to Congress every year because of the wear and tear they endure, as well as from weather and accidents.
A House Democratic aide with knowledge of the breakdown of ICE funding told the Washington Examiner that the money could essentially be used however ICE wanted, because the bill did not include “real structure” beyond fleet modernization and transportation.
Rep. Lucy McBath (D-GA), a member of the House Judiciary Committee, had proposed an amendment last year that would have made a small percentage of ICE funding available for lawmakers to conduct oversight of how the money was spent. That amendment was not passed.
“Federal funds are not abstract. They’re not theoretical numbers, whether allocated to law enforcement, victim services, crime prevention, or immigration enforcement. They are real taxpayer dollars,” McBath said in a statement. “And taxpayers expect to see how their hard-earned money is being spent.”
In the second half of 2025, Sheahan upgraded much of the workforce’s fleet from unmarked cars to marked ones, purchasing a couple of thousand vehicles.
Sheahan, who graduated from college in Ohio in 2019, was hand-picked by Noem to be the second-in-command of the 20,000-employee federal agency and its $9 billion budget. Sheehan’s prior experience included serving as a political director when Noem was South Dakota’s governor, as executive director of the South Dakota Republican Party, and as secretary of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries under Gov. Jeff Landry (R-LA).
Sources said Noem and DHS special government employee Corey Lewandowski, who supported a flashy campaign to intimidate illegal immigrants in the United States into self-deporting, supported Sheahan’s plan.
Those familiar with the plan said ICE’s career leaders would not have signed off on the purchase had they been consulted beforehand, because it went against protocol to drive identifiable vehicles in public.
ICE did not respond to requests for comment on the number of vehicles it purchased, the cost of the order, or whether Sheahan consulted with ICE employees before placing the order.
Fallout from the purchase
The order of 2,500 custom vehicles is the latest in a string of questionable expenditures by the DHS and its agencies over the past year, including hundreds of millions of dollars that the department put toward advertisements for illegal immigrants to self-deport.
ICE “absolutely” needs more vehicles, one source said. The agency is in the process of hiring and onboarding 10,000 additional personnel in its Enforcement and Removal Operations office, which had about 6,500 officers until last year.
However, the new vehicles cannot be used to go into communities and search for specific illegal immigrants that officers are searching for because they tip off anyone in eyesight that ICE is out. ICE operations in Democrat-run cities in particular have been met with large groups of activists trying to alert those nearby of ICE, even interfering in operations.
“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?”
The source continued, saying how in one California city, about 25 wrapped vehicles were delivered, but they were sent to a nearby immigrant detention facility and are now being stored on site for the time being.
A second source familiar with the purchases and fallout said the purchased marked vehicles are being used for custodial pick-ups, or when ICE asks a local jail or state prison to turn over someone in custody, and the jail agrees to do so. The marked vehicles cannot be used in general enforcement.
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Since Sheahan left ICE earlier this year, ICE headquarters is in the process of amending the order for the remaining undelivered vehicles to ensure they are not wrapped with the agency’s logo.
Sheahan did not respond to requests for comment.