Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem outside the White House on January 15. Photo / Demetrius Freeman, The Washington Post
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem arrived at a ranch along the United States-Mexico border on the morning of January 7 to host a roundtable on the historic decline in illegal border crossings.
It was supposed to be a friendly event.
Noem would ride a horse near the Rio Grande, get a look at buoys being installed in the water to deter migrants from entering the US and hear from admiring ranchers.
But a minute before the event began, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shot and killed Renee Good on a street in Minneapolis, inflaming tensions over the Trump Administration’s mass deportation campaign.
The shooting was still registering across the nation when Noem declared what she believed had happened after being questioned by reporters two-and-a-half hours later.
“It was an act of domestic terrorism,” Noem said as she stood beneath the warm Texas sun.
“This goes to show the assaults that our Ice officers and our law enforcement are under every single day.”
In the year since Noem left her post as South Dakota’s Governor to lead the Department of Homeland Security, the agency has dramatically transformed in ways that are increasingly visible to the American public.
Immigration and Border Patrol agents are deploying to city streets, entering neighbourhoods and homes to make arrests, and aggressively spraying protesters with tear gas - often in ways that many civil rights lawyers believe is breaking the law.
Homeland Security’s sprawling deportation campaign is a marked departure from the agency’s focus after its founding in the aftermath of September 11.
The department was created to protect the US against foreign terrorists and work closely with federal and local agencies.
Under Noem’s leadership, the agency has moved its focus to immigration enforcement - pulling and cutting resources from other operations, like the Federal Emergency Management Agency, to carry out the US President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign.
“DHS has now become an immigration department, and that’s not what it was founded for,” said a former senior DHS official who worked closely with Noem and spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
He said the shift is rattling even some conservatives who have “seen this build-up and this shift in priorities in ways that are almost prophetic for what people were concerned about back when DHS was first established”.
Noem’s response to Good’s shooting demonstrated the agency’s shifting priorities and its increasingly partisan direction, several current and former officials say.
All federal agencies are led by political appointees following the President’s agenda, but they said that Noem’s quick conclusion that Good was the aggressor is an example of an agency that is prioritising sticking to a political narrative about immigrants and protesters over cautious investigation.
Video that has emerged since the shooting has raised questions about the officer’s tactics and cast doubt about whether the use of force was necessary.
Noem and other Trump Administration officials quickly declared another shooting involving federal immigration agents an act of terrorism last Sunday.
Alexander “Alex” Pretti, 37, an intensive care nurse, was shot and killed on a Minneapolis street.
Noem said he was armed, intent on stopping a law enforcement operation and had “committed an act of domestic terrorism” but did not provide further details when asked what evidence she had seen to back up that assertion.
“This is more partisan and aggressively political than I’ve seen before,” said David Lapan, a former DHS spokesperson under the first Trump administration.
He noted that the agency is typically led in a “non-partisan way because you’re representing everybody in the US and not just the people that voted for a particular president”.
Although Democratic lawmakers are calling for Noem’s impeachment, her approach has won Trump’s praise, and she has already been in office longer than four of the six DHS secretaries during the President’s first administration.
But public support for her agenda is declining.
A recent Quinnipiac University national poll found that 52% disapproved of Noem’s performance as DHS secretary, and 57% also disapproved of Ice’s enforcement actions more broadly.
DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin rejected concerns that the agency has become more politicised under Noem as “false”, telling the Washington Post in an email that Noem has “refocused DHS to its core mission to protect the homeland”.
She also said Noem does not “make decisions based on fleeting political popularity of the moment” and that the secretary and Trump are making good on the mandate they were given by the American people.
“The American people, the law, and common sense are on our side,” McLaughlin said. “And we will not stop until law and order is restored after Biden’s open border chaos flooded our country with the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens.”
Noem’s ascent as a key spokesperson for Trump’s controversial mass deportation campaign is a sharp turn from the early days of her political career.
She was elected to the House of Representatives in 2010 and was seen as a rising GOP star willing to work across the aisle.
She once heaped praise on Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, saying, “I love working with Tim” because “he’s got such a common-sense approach”.
Former congressman Adam Kinzinger (Republican-Illinois), who was in the same congressional class as Noem, described her as a “very serious legislator” and recalled how she avoided the cameras in those days.
“I remember specifically she and her husband made a decision to do less TV at some point in the freshman term because she was being objectified on TV as a young, attractive lady,” Kinzinger said.
“To me, that was a very respectable decision, and the thing that’s strange now is obviously she goes out with the intention of trying to look a certain way, of trying to provoke a certain emotion.”
In her book No Going Back, Noem lamented the advice of her political consultants at the time, writing that she “started dressing like a ninety-year-old woman with shortish hair and boring nails”.
Kinzinger said he began to see a shift in Noem when she became Governor of South Dakota in 2019 and oversaw the state’s response to the pandemic.
She rejected restrictions and mask mandates and also won attention on the national stage by deploying National Guard members to the US-Mexico border, even though her state was more than 2250km away.
By 2024, Noem was under consideration as a possible vice-presidential pick for Trump, but a campaign aide said the fallout from revelations she made in her book hurt her chances.
She described shooting and killing her dog, Cricket, because the animal was unruly and aggressive, and falsely stated that she had met North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
After the election, Noem said she told Trump that she wanted to be Homeland Security secretary.
During her trip to the border in early January, she told ranchers that Trump seemed surprised.
“Why would you want that job?” she said he asked. Noem said she responded, “Sir, well, it’s your number one priority and I think you’re going to have to have somebody who actually is tough enough to do it.”
In interviews and public speeches since, she has repeatedly characterised the mass deportation campaign as a matter of public safety.
“This is about our country and adding safety back to our country and making sure that Americans are put first,” Noem said at the Conservative Political Action Conference last year.
“And, yes, we understand that there’s people that will be impacted and families that will be impacted, and we’re going to handle this in a way that America always does. We’re going to do it with excellence, but we’re going to do the right thing.”
Noem has embraced the role of the tough face of DHS. She has been filmed in tactical gear at Ice raids in blue cities vowing to arrest “dirtbags”.
She flew to a notorious Salvadoran megaprison where Ice had transported hundreds of Venezuelans under an arcane law and recorded a message warning undocumented migrants not to come to the US or face the same fate.
She also starred in a US$200 million ad campaign thanking Trump for securing the border and telling immigrants if they come to the US illegally, DHS will “hunt you down”.
“She aggressively made herself the poster child of the Trump enforcement actions,” said Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, a non-partisan think-tank. “The actions of the DHS in the past were out of sight.”
Now, DHS’s social media feed is replete with posts mocking undocumented immigrants and showing them being arrested and put in handcuffs.
The agency has also taken to posting paintings depicting the idea of a predominantly white America. Most recently, the agency published an Ice recruitment promotion that stated, “We’ll Have Our Home Again” - a phrase associated with a song embraced by white nationalists.
When asked about the recruitment post, McLaughlin said there were “plenty of poems, songs and books with the same title.
“The fact that people would like to cherry pick something of white nationalism with the same title to make a connection to DHS law enforcement is disgusting,” she said, adding that such commentaries have helped fuel an uptick in assaults against officers.
Some former DHS officials and academics said that the agency’s messaging is a sharp contrast with the bipartisan tone agency officials heralded after the September 11, 2001, attacks.
When DHS was founded, 22 federal departments and agencies were combined, with the idea that enhanced co-ordination could help thwart another attack. Now some worry that increased partisanship could lead to less co-ordination, particularly with local law enforcement, some in blue cities the agency is now targeting.
“There were Republican and Democratic leaders who were behind it, and it was really designed to be the best of the best of the federal government being brought together in a non-partisan way,” said Donald Kettl, former dean at the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland.
“That was at the core and the fundamental of the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. The last thing that anybody wanted was to have any hyper-partisanship that would come into being able to try to deal with terrorism.”
He added: “The difference now could not be more night and day”.
Even some Republicans acknowledge that the aggressive nature of the enforcement campaign could create problems for the party.
Representative Tony Gonzales (R-Texas), whose district spans more than 1300km along the US-Mexico border, said the agency’s focus on immigration enforcement is “very needed”.
But he cautioned that when people begin to see members of their communities arrested, including those with no violent criminal record, it could deter voters.
“I thought we were going after the murderer, not my neighbour’s son that’s a construction worker,” he said some voters might think.
“When more and more people have a direct story like that they become anxious, and that’s the part I think you start to lose folks.”
Noem’s critics contend the political shift at DHS isn’t just a matter of perception. They say it’s also changing how the agency works.
Corey Lewandowski, Noem’s top aide and Trump’s former campaign manager, plays an influential role in many key decisions at DHS, including reviewing contracts that exceed US$100,000.
His background is heavier on politics and lobbying than law enforcement, and his status as a special government employee has raised ethical concerns.
Temporary workers are limited to 130 days of employment per year and Lewandowski has frequently been seen with Noem while she is on official travel and attending briefings for Fema. In a statement, DHS said Lewandowski has complied with all financial and ethical requirements and does not receive a salary.
Last autumn, DHS reassigned dozens of Fema employees to Immigration and Customs Enforcement to help vet and process new hires for the Government’s mass deportation initiative. More recently, DHS terminated dozens of Fema employees while also approving the extension of some workers who are still detailed to Ice, according to an official familiar with the process.
Noem is also facing scrutiny for her role in the Administration’s decision to suspend the due process rights of more than 130 Venezuelan men and send them to a notorious prison in El Salvador. She recently claimed in a court filing that she was the one who decided to continue to fly the men to the Terrorism Confinement Centre despite a judge’s order barring their removal.
Several federal judges have lambasted DHS’ efforts to deport undocumented immigrants to countries where they are not citizens; deny bond hearings; and strip people of protections from deportation even as conditions in their home countries remain dangerous.
US District Judge Matthew Kennelly recently noted that Noem’s efforts to cancel temporary status for thousands of people coincide with the President’s efforts to eliminate TPS and suggest she didn’t “review the evidence regarding any of these countries”.
The agency’s policies - including a new Ice memo authorising officers to enter people’s homes with only an administrative warrant - take place as DHS is rapidly expanding.
In July, Congress signed off on US$170 billion for Trump’s border and immigration agenda over four years as part of the GOP’s sprawling tax bill. That money included an unprecedented US$45b for detention, more than US$46.5b for constructing a wall along the US-Mexico border and US$6b for border technology and security.
This month, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement said that it had hired more than 12,000 new officers and agents.
In internal messages to DHS staff shared with the Post, Noem has touted the record decline in border crossings, a drop in fentanyl smuggling across the US-Mexico border, and the removal of undocumented immigrants with criminal records, among other feats, as “making America safe for generations to come”.
Senator Mike Rounds (R-South Dakota), another former South Dakota governor, said that Noem “is doing what the President wants her to do.”
But some former DHS officials say building the agency around Trump’s campaign promises could come at a public cost for the agency.
The consequences of steering the agency in a more partisan direction might be profound and difficult to reverse, said Paul Rosenzweig, a former DHS deputy assistant secretary under President George W. Bush and a vocal Trump critic.
In the case of the Good shooting, in particular, he said prior administrations would be sounding a far different message.
“No responsible police or law enforcement chief other than Ms Noem in the current environment would have declared the innocence of their officer in advance of those investigations,” he said.
Noem’s response to Good’s death and Ice’s aggressive immigration enforcement operations have prompted calls from Democrats for her resignation.
Representative Robin Kelly (D-Illinois) introduced articles of impeachment against Noem on January 14 on the grounds that she has obstructed Congress by blocking legislators from entering detention facilities, violated public trust with the agency’s aggressive immigration enforcement tactics and used “her position for personal gain while inappropriately using taxpayer dollars”. Kelly, who is running for Senate in Illinois, has more than 100 co-sponsors, according to her office. But the effort is unlikely to move forward in the GOP-controlled House.
“She has got to know that people are watching - and even more important than Congress watching, the public is watching,” Kelly said.
On the morning of Good’s killing, Noem was hearing a far different message.
Two minutes after the shots were fired, she had kicked off a roundtable with ranchers and law enforcement officials.
She asked members of the panel to talk about what they “lived through during the Biden administration years” and nodded approvingly as one panellist described a “huge difference” under the second Trump Administration.
When asked by a reporter in Texas what the hardest part of her job was, Noem replied: “Nothing’s hard about this job. My favourite thing to do is to solve problems and meet challenges.”
Five hours later, she was back in Minneapolis.
- Maria Sacchetti, Perry Stein and Jonathan Baran contributed to this report.
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