After scooping up 10 airplanes for an enormous $464 million price tag, including several luxury jetliners, the Department of Homeland Security has reportedly kept them out of service — or used them to ferry around Trump administration officials.

The agency under now-former Secretary Kirsti Noem purchased the planes with no-bid contracts starting last year, claiming that the administration’s mass deportation campaign presented an urgent need to quickly add to the government’s fleet with no time to review other offers.

But immigration authorities appear to have barely used them for that purpose, despite the administration’s plans to deport as many as one million people from the country a year. Instead, officials appear to be “running an in-house private jet service,” according to Democrats on the Senate Appropriations committee, which is now reviewing the agency’s “wasteful use” of taxpayer dollars. Their letter was first reported by The New York Times.

Congressional Republicans injected tens of billions of dollars into Homeland Security over the last year outside of the annual budget process, including billions of dollars through Donald Trump’s One Beautiful Bill Act last summer. From there, Homeland Security spent nearly $200 million on a pair of Gulfstream G650 jets — one was leased to FBI Director Kash Patel and another was handed over to Trump’s border czar Tom Homan.

“The American people deserve a full accounting of this gross misuse of their tax dollars, and Congress needs more information to conduct sorely-needed oversight and to appropriately craft this coming year’s funding bill for the department,” the Democrats wrote in a letter dated August 12.

The agency also purchased seven Boeing 737 passenger jets, which were parked at an airport in Lake Charles, Louisiana, for months at a time, without any staff to operate them, according to documents obtained by The Times.

Four of the planes, which can seat up to 200 passengers, were intended to be used by congressional delegations, but Homeland Security “has not provided information on why it is necessary or a permissible use of funds” for that purpose, according to Senate Democrats.

Three of those seven plans were supposed to support Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportation flights.

“Top former DHS officials and industry experts have noted that these acquisitions waste tax dollars, and we remain alarmed by how ICE may use these planes to support the administration’s lawless immigration enforcement,” they wrote.

Another Boeing 787-8 MAX jet was outfitted with a bedroom, shower, kitchen, bar and flat screen televisions while the agency said the plane would “serve dual missions — both as ICE deportation flights and for cabinet-level travel,” according to the senators.

Homeland Security is now reportedly removing the bedroom, and the plane is being loaned out to the Department of Defense instead, the senators said.

The agency has failed to use its massive pile of taxpayer funding to “actually improve the lives of Americans by requiring basic compliance with the Fourth Amendment, acquiring and deploying body-worn cameras to every law enforcement officer in the field, mandating minimum officer identification, or properly training new hires,” senators wrote.

Instead, “this administration has lit taxpayer dollars on fire by acquiring new and unnecessary planes to jet Trump officials around in extreme luxury that the vast majority of Americans will never experience,” they said.

They are asking for Homeland Security’s inspector general to investigate.

Secretary Markwayne Mullin has also been asked to provide members of Congress with contract details for each plane, flight logs and other documents about how the planes are being used, as well as the “legal justifications for the purchase, operation, and maintenance, as well as planned uses, of these aircraft.”

The Trump administration has cited “emergency” conditions hundreds of times to rush through no-bid contracts, dozens of which are under congressional scrutiny and the subject of federal lawsuits.

In a statement, Homeland Security said the no-bid contract for Daedalus Aviation Corporation, which is led by a chairman who donated to a political committee that supported Noem, “was made and approved by department leadership” before Mullin was sworn into the role earlier this year.

Daedalus Aviation’s president also runs Salus Worldwide Solutions, which received nearly $1 billion as part of another contract with the agency.

That company also has ties to Corey Lewandowski, a close aide to Noem who is also facing congressional scrutiny for his role in Homeland Security contracts. He has been accused of participating in an alleged “pay-to-play scheme” in which he allegedly helped steer contracts to firms tied to him and his associates.

Federal contracts, however, show that the contract with Daedalus swelled by $303 million on the day Mullin was sworn in.

Homeland Security said the agency “reserves the right to adjust course in an environment with evolving requirements and demands.”

ICE has largely relied on private companies to charter its deportation flights, or, in some cases, used military aircraft, making it unclear why the agency would suddenly require a new fleet of luxury jets to support the president’s efforts to swiftly arrest and remove tens of thousands of people from the country. When the first contract was awarded in November, ICE was already paying other contractors to operate its ICE Air network.

“We would be happy to work with you and our colleagues in Congress to return those dollars to the Treasury and put them to better use making sure Americans can afford health care, rent, and groceries,” Senate Democrats wrote.