Noem has become the face of Donald Trump mass deportation drive – and seems to relish the role
WASHINGTON, DC – In the pantheon of individuals holding prominent positions within the Trump administration, no cabinet member seems bolder in enabling Donald Trump’s most excessive ambitions than Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem.
The 53-year-old former governor of South Dakota had presidential aspirations of her own, which were derailed last year when she published a memoir revealing that she had once killed her family’s dog after it proved untrainable and killed some chickens. The gunshot that dispatched Cricket after she “dragged him to a gravel pit” appeared at the time to have derailed Noem’s career.
Trump, however, had other ideas.
The US President has form in appointing ice maidens to oversee Homeland Security. During his first term in the White House, Kirstjen Nielsen served in the role from 2017 to 2019, implementing the first stirrings of Trump’s mass deportation campaign. But Trump ultimately found her lacking in the ruthless department. “Kirstjen, you’re just not tough enough,” he reportedly told her during one encounter, where he also complained that she did not “look the part” of a homeland security chief.
So for his second term, Noem was brought into the heart of government, and has gone out of her way to avoid similar criticisms from her boss.
Dubbed “ICE Barbie” by her critics, after the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement department that falls under her, Noem is no pen-pusher.
A self-styled “wife, mother, grandma, rancher and small business owner” – to quote her Instagram bio – Noem may go down in history as the pliant and brutal overseer of Trump’s masked Border Patrol and ICE agents, who are seizing people off the streets in major US cities, only later determining whether or not they are candidates for deportation.
Noem’s determination to facilitate the deportation of illegal immigrants – Trump spoke of having 25 million people in his sights during an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes over the weekend – has been backed up by her physical presence on the streets, alongside the agents she has deployed.
Last month, Noem was in Chicago to join federal agents in the field as they engaged in “Operation Midway Blitz”, defined by her department as an effort to target those who flocked to Chicago and Illinois because they knew “sanctuary policies would protect them and allow them to roam free on American streets”.
“Hi, I’m Kristi,” she told one man, handcuffed in the back of an ICE vehicle. Without disclosing her role, she demanded to know: “How many times have you come in and have gone out of the country illegally?”
The man, who did not appear to have been told he had a right to remain silent, told her he had illegally crossed the border five times. “You will be brought to justice and prosecuted for your crimes,” Noem replied, in a scene that was recorded and then disseminated for public viewing.
In March, Noem flew to El Salvador, where she visited the country’s notorious CECOT terrorism confinement centre. Video cameras rolled as she stood in front of cages of shirtless men who, just days earlier, had been detained on America’s streets. That they had been flown to El Salvador in defiance of a US court order did nothing to diminish Noem’s enthusiasm for their confinement.
Addressing illegal immigrants in America, she urged them to “know that this facility is one of the tools in our toolkit that we will use if you commit crimes against the American people”. Incarceration at CECOT, she said, was “one of the consequences you could face”.
Noem’s loyalty to Trump appears to know no bounds.
In the last week, she has claimed that no US citizens have been caught up in the country’s mass deportation drive, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary. “We focus on those that are here illegally. And anything that you would hear or report that would be different than that is simply not true,” she said on a visit to Indiana.
Meanwhile, Noem’s head of the Border Patrol, Greg Bovino, has boasted of profiling people as his agents go about their daily work. Asked to explain what might lead to someone’s detention, he said: “If you look panicked when you see a Border Patrol agent, perhaps you look scared, perhaps your demeanour changes, perhaps you’re gripping the steering wheel so tightly that I can see the whites of your knuckles”.
Any of those could now be enough to be carted off to the nearest detention centre.
Because of her loyalty, as well as her enthusiasm for the White House’s mass deportation drive, Noem’s star is ascendant in Trump’s inner circle. She has reportedly sought advice from New York financiers on how to secure funding for a possible further run at elective office, suggesting she may seek the presidency again. For now, however, she has her work cut out for her, as Trump presses for a rapid uptick in the number of deportations taking place.
Trump appears enamoured with Noem. In August, at the opening of a migrant detention center in Florida dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz”, the US President told her: “You are tough as hell… but you do it in a very nice way”.
Even so, when Democrats do eventually return to power, Noem will likely be one of their main targets for investigation. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker has accused her of “violating the United States Constitution, denying people due process, and disappearing law-abiding neighbours”.
For Noem, accountability may one day come knocking. But until that day comes, she is being given free rein by Trump to run the most authoritarian aspect of his hard-line Government.
