Kristi Noem associate Madison Sheahan bought 2,500 marked vehicles for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement

From the article:

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.

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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 Sheahan, placed a bulk order for vehicles clearly marked with ICE’s logo.

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“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.

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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.

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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. Sheahan’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).

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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.

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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.