Feds wasted $41 million deporting illegal immigrants on nearly-empty charter flights

Although the Department of Homeland Security agency deporting 930,435 detainees between October 2010 and March 2014, it spent $116 million on charter flights that were less than 80 percent full, according to a report released Friday by the department’s inspector general.

The immigration agency spent nearly $12 million on flights that were less than 40 percent full.

The agency charters eight private planes for detainees, and each holds 135 passengers. It pays an average of $8,419 an hour to fly those planes no matter how empty the plane is.

Overall, Immigration and Customs Enforcement spent $464 million on charter flights to transport illegal immigrants between October 2010 and March 2014.

But the agency didn’t keep track of basic information about its air transportation program, such as reasons why detainees missed flights or how many illegal immigrants should be on each plane.

Missing data prevented the watchdog from figuring out where all of the illegal immigrants were taken.

For example, 23,597 detainees were listed as being “picked up” or “dropped off” at places the charter flight routes never crossed. The agency also did not record whether some detainees had criminal backgrounds.

“The data field ‘criminality’ was not restricted to specific entry choices and contains non-logical entries such as ‘#Ref!’. The field is blank for 20,798 detainees,” the report said.

The empty flights drained as much as $41.1 million in three and a half years, the inspector general said.

Some of the transfers were simply transfers back and forth of detainees between the same cities for no apparent reason before shipping them back to their countries of origin.

The homeland security department claimed that empty seats should not be a measure of efficiency because delaying flights to fill the seats would ultimately be more costly.

Go here to read the full Department of Homeland Security inspector general report.