Agents of Mass Deportation: Who is DHS Secretary Nominee Kristi Noem?
Donald Trump’s mass deportation team has been taking shape, and it is alarming, as expected. Trump has announced that he has selected South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem as his nominee for secretary of Homeland Security, joining noted white nationalist Stephen Miller and former acting ICE director Thomas Homan to carry out the incoming administration’s “bloody” mass deportation agenda. Noem has virtually no experience in many of the department’s most critical responsibilities, most notably in counterterrorism, transportation security, border security, Coast Guard operations and immigration. “In any other administration (even Trump’s first) she would be an unserious candidate,” The Bulwark noted.
Despite being floated as a possible running mate for Trump in 2024 until news about her dog-killing likely derailed her nomination, Noem initially opposed his 2016 presidential run, endorsing Marco Rubio early in the campaign and criticizing Trump’s pledge to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. as “un-American.” But Noem has been a lot more political weathervane than principled leader, voting for Trump anyway. “She’s like a political chameleon,” a former South Dakota GOP legislator told the Argus Leader in 2022. Where Noem has fulfilled a requirement is an allegiance to Trump’s nativist agenda, which she has been allied with in her present capacity as governor. Her selection sends disturbing signals about the immigration direction of the second Trump term.
NOEM SUPPORTED TRUMP’S MUSLIM BAN, EFFORT TO END DACA, AND REFUSED TO CONDEMN HIM ON FAMILY SEPARATION
After initially opposing candidate Trump’s anti-Muslim pledge in 2016, then-House Rep. Noem vociferously supported President Trump’s Muslim ban in 2017, claiming in a statement that she shared his unfounded “concerns about our ability to screen refugees” and endorsed stopping certain admissions “until the administration can certify that asylum-seekers do not present a safety threat to the U.S.” Noem’s claims, of course, were bunk, and based purely on islamophobia and racism. Not only is refugee screening vigorous – sometimes taking as long as two years – the foreign-born are less likely than U.S.-born Americans to commit crime.
Noem also supported Trump’s decision in September 2017 to rescind DACA, falsely describing the popular and successful program as “unconstitutional” and claiming that “President Trump was right to restore the constitutional balance of power.” Such a reversal could have made some 800,000 Dreamers living and working in the U.S. vulnerable to deportation, many to countries they don’t even remember. Since that time, South Dakota has also been among GOP-led states continuing to attack Dreamers, including joining a lawsuit led by the notorious anti-immigrant zealot Kris Kobach attempting to block taxpaying DACA recipients from ACA eligibility. “DACA’s subsidized health insurance for illegal immigrants would be at the cost of struggling working citizens,” South Dakota’s attorney general claimed. The facts: DACA recipients in South Dakota and across the nation contributions have helped keep the Social Security and Medicare programs alive through their taxes, contributing more than $2 billion annually. More importantly, DACA recipients live and work in our communities and - as the pandemic demonstrated - the health of the community relies on the health of its people.
During her time in Congress, Noem also refused to join the widespread bipartisan condemnation of Trump’s cruel and traumatic family separation policy. “No one wants to see families broken apart,” she claimed at the height of the family separation crisis in June 2018, “but this debate highlights the challenges that come when we don’t secure our border.” But family separation was not a matter of border security, it was a policy noisily pushed by Miller and Homan as a punishment to families lawfully seeking asylum. Trump has not ruled out reinstating the policy when he returns to power next year, which would put Noem at the center of a possible return of one of the most horrific chapters in modern U.S. history. The memo authorizing the zero tolerance policy that resulted in separations during the first Trump administration was signed by then-DHS Sec. Kirstjen Nielsen (despite her repeated and shameless lies that there was no official policy). Noem’s previous assertion that family separation was functionally a necessary evil of our broken system suggests she is likely to reinstate the horrific – and ineffective – policy.
NOEM SUPPORTED TEXAS’ BORDER STUNT AND BOOSTED DEADLY WHITE NATIONALIST ‘INVASION’ CONSPIRACY THEORIES
During her tenure as governor, Noem has been a boisterous supporter of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s wildly expensive and ineffective Operation Lone Star, including deploying South Dakota National Guard to participate in the border stunt and even offering to “personally deliver razor wire” to Texas. "Governor Abbott has done the exact right thing," Noem said on Fox News. "And I'll drive him more razor wire from South Dakota if I have to for him to do his job." Keep in mind, a sound-minded federal judge in Texas and the conservative Supreme Court had already ruled against Texas when Noem said she’d jump into her truck, a dangerous offer from a potential DHS secretary as it signals her openness to unlawfully defy any potential court that may impede a second Trump administration’s nativist agenda.
Noem has also been among Republicans who have pushed the dangerous and deadly “invasion” conspiracy theory cited by numerous racist mass murderers, recklessly and falsely claiming that the nation “is in a time of invasion,” that the “invasion is coming over our southern border,” and that Mexican cartels “are waging war against our nation.” This same white nationalist conspiratorial rhetoric has inspired a pattern of deadly terrorist attacks across the United States in recent years. The current DHS Secretary has warned that the normalization of such rhetoric increases the threat landscape that the department – and the nation - faces.
Meanwhile, as COVID ran wild in her state due to incompetence and callousness, Noem was also among GOP governors to support Abbott in his promotion of the tired and racist trope about immigrants bringing disease. “Unlike states that had soaring case counts early in the pandemic, neither North Dakota nor South Dakota ever issued stay-at-home orders,” NBC News reported at the time. “Mask mandates, if they came, came late.”
Noem would ultimately deploy the South Dakota National Guard to Texas at least three times. But when South Dakotans faced a legitimate threat in the form of devastating flooding this past summer, Noem refused to activate troops to come to the assistance of panicked constituents in her state, laughably claiming that “it would be ‘extremely expensive’ and that the Guard should only be used for ‘a very crisis situation,’” Nebraska Examiner reported in June. Keep in mind, soldiers deployed to Texas had criticized Abbott’s operation as political theater. “If anything, I think it makes for better pictures for campaign ads,” Hunter Schuler, a former Texas Army National Guard medic, told HuffPost.
WHILE IT’S MILLER WHO WILL BE IN CHARGE OF MASS DEPORTATION, NOEM WILL BE A WILLING ACCOMPLICE
Mass deportation, the signature promise of Trump’s 2024 campaign, is set to be carried out by ICE and CBP, both immigration enforcement agencies under DHS. But while Noem will be in charge on paper if confirmed, let’s be clear that it’s Miller who will be running the show on immigration, as he did during the entirety of the first Trump administration. Mass deportation has been his (as well as Homan’s) singular obsession, and Noem’s nomination gives their agenda what they believe to be a modicum of respectability and a chance of passing Senate confirmation (after all, Miller and Homan, both very off-putting and weird men, aren’t facing the same for a reason).
But don’t get it wrong: Noem appears to be perfectly supportive of the Trump plan to toss out common-sense enforcement priorities currently laid out by ICE and make all undocumented immigrants at risk of separation and deportation, no matter their lack of a criminal record, their billions in tax contributions over the years, their U.S. citizen children or how long they’ve lived in the U.S (nearly 80% have lived here for a decade or more). “Noem, who Trump once considered as a possible running mate, signaled the new GOP administration would eventually target immigrants who had not committed crimes after arriving in the U.S.,” The Los Angeles Times reported. “When they came into our country, let’s all remember: The first thing they did was break the law,” Noem said. This is part of a strategy painting all immigrants as criminals. If they can convince Americans they’re only going after the “bad guys,” they hope they can minimize the political fallout of their violent mass deportation designs.
Noem’s participation in Abbott’s border stunt at the expense of her own constituents also previews her willingness to sign off on Miller’s plans to use state National Guard troops to help carry out mass family separation. “Miller says a reelected Trump intends to requisition National Guard troops from sympathetic Republican-controlled states and then deploy them into Democratic-run states whose governors refuse to cooperate with their deportation drive,” Ron Brownstein reported in The Atlantic earlier this year. “Gov Kristi Noem sent troops to Texas and billed us, South Dakota taxpayers,” slammed State Senate President Pro Tempore Lee Schoenbeck, a member of her own party. “BUT Noem said it’s too expensive to use our guard to help our taxpayers fight the flood. Explain this hypocrisy???”
If confirmed, Noem would also be the first DHS Secretary to be banned from certain regions of the country, calling into question how effectively she can perform a cabinet position tasked with securing the homeland. “All of South Dakota’s nine indigenous tribes have voted to ban Gov. Kristi Noem from their lands,” CNN reported this past summer, in part over despicable claims that tribal leaders were profiting from drug cartels. If she really wants to talk profiting off the cartels, she should check out Howard Lutnick, Trump’s pick for Commerce Secretary. Let’s not also forget her incompetent and callous response to COVID.
The Bulwark noted that Noem’s nomination “was buried in the landslide of even more absurd nominees,” including now-former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, another unqualified Trump pick who eventually withdrew his nomination for U.S. Attorney General over horrific sexual misconduct allegations. With national security at play, Noem’s nomination deserves further scrutiny from senators.
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