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

Photo Illustration by Eric Faison/The Daily Beast/Getty Images/ReutersA 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.Read more at The Daily Beast.