“We are delighted to see the media is highlighting the Trump administration’s cost-effective and innovative ways of delivering on the American people’s mandate for mass deportations of criminal illegal aliens,” DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement to CNBC when asked about the Post’s article.

“This new initiative will save $279 million in taxpayer dollars by allowing ICE to operate more effectively, including by using more efficient flight patterns, McLaughlin said.

“President Trump and Secretary Noem are committed to quickly and efficiently getting criminal illegal aliens OUT of our country,” she said.

CNBC has requested comment from Daedalus Aviation.

Currently, most deportation flights overseen by ICE Air Operations, a division of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, are carried out by charter-flight companies.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on Wednesday denied that the Trump administration’s tariff policies were to blame after a new report showed a surprise drop in private payrolls in November.

Instead, Lutnick argued on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” that the government shutdown temporarily slowed small-business activity. He added that the federal efforts to enact mass deportations of undocumented immigrants also suppressed jobs numbers.

“No, no, it’s not tariffs,” Lutnick said when asked whether President Donald Trump‘s import duties explained Wednesday morning’s report from ADP, which revealed an unexpected 32,000-worker drop in the labor market.

That decline, a sharp turnabout from October, was led by businesses with fewer than 50 workers, which saw their payroll numbers sink by 120,000. Larger businesses, meanwhile, reported a net gain of 90,000 workers.

“Remember, you had the Democratic shutdown, right? And what do you think happens to small business? The people who do business with the U.S. government, they know they’re not getting paid, so they sort of slow down their projects,” Lutnick said.

“So you saw a little bit, even, of construction small business down. So the Democratic shutdown hurt the numbers,” he said.

“And then, remember, as you deport people, that’s going to suppress private job numbers of small businesses,” Lutnick added.

But the Cabinet secretary assured that those figures will “rebalance and they’ll regrow,” claiming “this is just a near-term event” and that “next year, the numbers are going to be fantastic.”

He also reiterated his prior prediction that U.S. GDP will rise above 4% in 2026.

Lutnick’s defense of Trump’s protectionist agenda came as corporate executives and economic forecasters have started to warn that his alternately aggressive and unpredictable tariffs could spur domestic job cuts in the coming year.

“Hiring has been choppy of late as employers weather cautious consumers and an uncertain macroeconomic environment,” ADP’s chief economist, Nela Richardson, said in a press release accompanying the private payrolls report.

“And while November’s slowdown was broad-based, it was led by a pullback among small businesses,” Richardson said.

Constellation Brands’ beer sales fell 2% in its latest quarter as President Donald Trump‘s deportations and consumers’ broader economic fears weighed on demand.

In April, Constellation CEO Bill Newlands said that Hispanic consumers are spending less due to their concerns about Trump’s hard-line immigration policy and possible job losses in industries with high Latino employment bases. During Wednesday’s earnings conference call, Newlands acknowledged that raids by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement were making it difficult to predict consumer behavior moving forward, although he demurred about tying the beer division’s slowdown to Hispanic shoppers specifically during the company’s fiscal first-quarter call.

“When you see a fair amount of change, both Hispanic and non-Hispanic consumers are concerned about inflation and about cost structure,” Newlands told analysts.

Hispanic consumers are a core part of Constellation’s customer base. The brewer, which owns Modelo, Corona and Pacifico, says that roughly half of its beer sales come from Latinos in the U.S.

Constellation’s earnings and revenue for the quarter ended May 31 fell short of Wall Street’s estimates, hurt by weaker beer demand and higher aluminum costs from Trump’s tariffs. Still, the company reiterated its full-year outlook, signaling confidence that it can achieve its financial targets despite economic uncertainty.

Constellation isn’t the only packaged food and beverage company to report weaker demand from Hispanic consumers. Last quarter, Coca-Cola and Colgate-Palmolive were also among the companies that tied a slowdown in U.S. sales to a pullback by Hispanic shoppers.