Late last March, after being held incommunicado for nearly two weeks in a mega-prison in El Salvador, a group of Venezuelans learned that Kristi Noem, the U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security, had arrived to tour the facility. “We were happy when she got here,” a twenty-nine-year-old refugee named Roger Molina Acevedo told me. He thought that she might be interested to know that prison guards were torturing the detainees; perhaps the information Noem collected would prompt the U.S. government, which had sent him and two hundred and fifty-one other men to the prison without due process, to reverse course. Inside the prison, Noem wore a navy baseball hat, a tight white long-sleeved shirt, and a fifty-thousand-dollar Rolex watch. Just before she reached Molina Acevedo’s cell, she turned around and left. “She didn’t speak to anyone,” he said. Instead, Noem addressed the cameras. “I want to thank El Salvador and their President for their partnership with the United States of America to bring our terrorists here,” she said. “I also want everybody to know, if you come to our country illegally, this is one of the consequences you could face.”
Noem, who was known by critics as “ICE Barbie”—accessorized for any law-enforcement scenario—spent most of her time in President Donald Trump’s Cabinet performing for the cameras. She dressed up in Coast Guard fatigues and in the green uniform of Border Patrol; she posed in flak jackets, and demanded that ICE agents record their arrests for social-media videos. In one case, as part of a two-hundred-and-twenty-million-dollar ad campaign, she recorded a message on horseback in front of Mount Rushmore, wearing a cowboy hat and tasselled chaps. “You cross the border illegally, we’ll find you,” she said. “Break our laws, we’ll punish you.” The ad was shot on the second day of a government shutdown. White House staffers told the Wall Street Journal that Trump was annoyed. He demanded to know where she got the money for the junket. It turned out, according to ProPublica, that the political-consulting firm that landed the contract for the shoot had extensive ties to Noem and members of her staff.
On Thursday, Trump removed Noem from her post, saying on Truth Social that her next role in the Administration would be as special envoy to the Shield of the Americas, a new initiative with no governing power. There are two ways to summarize Noem’s disastrous tenure at the Department of Homeland Security: one as a tragicomic story of vanity, vacuousness, and self-obsession, and the other as a grim account of how the department has imploded under her leadership. In either case, she will be remembered not only as the most incompetent Secretary in the department’s twenty-three-year history but also as the person who succeeded where many progressive activists had failed in discrediting much of the D.H.S.’s institutional legitimacy.
Early in Trump’s 2024 Presidential campaign, Noem, who had previously been the governor of South Dakota, was frequently mentioned as a potential running mate. Her chief credential was that she was loudly and unabashedly pro-Trump. Five years earlier, Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s former campaign strategist, began advising Noem on how best to ingratiate herself with the President. Her prospects for joining the ticket seemed solid until the publication of a political memoir, in which she recounted, in explicit detail, how she’d killed her family’s dog, Cricket. “It was not a pleasant job,” she wrote, but “it had to be done.” Trump was reportedly “disgusted” by the story. “Even you wouldn’t kill a dog, and you kill everything,” he told his eldest son, according to Alex Isenstadt’s 2025 book,“Revenge: The Inside Story of Trump’s Return to Power.” After Trump’s reëlection, however, the incident was said to have struck the President as an example of the sort of tough-mindedness that would be important for a Homeland Security Secretary. As John Oliver recently put it, “Noem didn’t bring a lot of non-dog-murdering experience to the job.”
The D.H.S. is the third-largest federal department, with more than a dozen agencies and some two hundred and sixty thousand employees. Past Secretaries, from Republican and Democratic Administrations, used to complain that immigration enforcement tended to overshadow, and undermine, all of the department’s other work, which includes cybersecurity, disaster relief, and the Secret Service. “Immigration is overheated and over-politicized,” Jeh Johnson, who served under President Barack Obama, once told me. “It has overwhelmed D.H.S.” With Trump in the White House, given both his obsession with the issue and his expectation of total fealty, it was virtually impossible to create a veneer of gravitas and impartiality at the department. Noem seemed almost gleeful about dashing whatever pretense may have remained after Trump’s first term. In her inaugural address to department staff, she walked out to a country song called “Hot Mama,” with the chorus, “You turn me on, let’s turn it up, and turn this room into a sauna.”
Even before Noem took over the department, there were rumors that she and Lewandowski were having an affair, something both of them have denied. But Noem’s leadership was inextricably tied to Lewandowski. He reportedly signed documents as Noem’s “chief advisor,” despite not being a member of the department or the Administration. Technically, he was “a special government employee,” a status reserved for private citizens who can consult with the federal government for no more than a hundred and thirty days a year. Department officials nevertheless described Lewandowski as a ubiquitous presence. He travelled in a private cabin with Noem on a seventy-million-dollar 737 MAX jet that the department leased and is seeking to purchase. (This was nearly double the cost of each of six other commercial planes that Noem had the department buy to carry out deportation flights.) At one point, according to the Wall Street Journal, Lewandowski fired a Coast Guard pilot who forgot to fetch Noem’s blanket from an aircraft. And he often avoided swiping into department buildings to stay under the service limit as a special government employee.
Much of Lewandowski’s influence appeared to be about consolidating power and control. Last summer, Noem created a policy requiring her to personally sign off on any department expenditure that was more than a hundred thousand dollars. Almost immediately, the agencies’ work ground to a halt. The policy coincided with hurricane season, and relief efforts in states such as Missouri, North Carolina, and California were delayed, angering the public and, in many cases, their Republican representatives. “People are hurting in western North Carolina from the most significant storm they’ve ever experienced,” Thom Tillis, the Republican North Carolina senator, told Noem at a recent hearing. “It begs the question: why?” Kevin Kiley, a California Republican, citing a two-and-a-half-million-dollar grant that has languished since June, told her, “My constituents are not being well served by your department.”
In Noem’s defense, Homeland Security’s marginalization of the Federal Emergency Management Agency was a goal shared across the Administration, which has sought to systematically redirect federal resources to immigration enforcement. Yet for all of Noem’s public bluster about immigration—the speeches baselessly villainizing immigrants as violent criminals, the routine threats and insults—she still managed to alienate potential allies inside the government. Noem and Lewandowski elevated Greg Bovino, the now disgraced Border Patrol commander, over more seasoned agency hands to carry out violent arrest operations in American cities. She also found herself at frequent odds with Tom Homan, Trump’s so-called border czar. When Homan appeared on television, Noem reportedly demanded to know how he got booked instead of her.
Noem’s insistence on filming arrest operations was both disgraceful and counterproductive. In some instances, according to reporting by CBS News, she had agents arrest protesters so that they would appear in cuffs on social-media spots, only to release them afterward without charges. One of the ironies of her obsession with cameras was that videos of abuses perpetrated by ICE and Border Patrol started to go viral. When Trump demanded answers, Noem blamed others, including those who’d cautioned against the very policies she pursued.
The beginning of the end for Noem was the killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, two American citizens, in Minneapolis. Both of them clearly posed no imminent threats to federal agents. But Noem didn’t hesitate to call them “domestic terrorists” anyway. When pressed by journalists and lawmakers, she doubled down. This was a lie but also a bad political bet, because although Trump’s chief adviser, Stephen Miller, had said the same thing, she quickly became the face of both the department’s aggression and its mendacity.
Under Noem, immigration agents have arrested, assaulted, and killed citizens and noncitizens alike. They have patrolled American cities wearing masks and driving unmarked cars, and have, by Noem’s own admission, entered people’s homes without judicial warrants, apparently in violation of the Fourth Amendment. Racial profiling is virtually a stated part of the department’s strategy, and ad campaigns have openly espoused white-nationalist rhetoric and talking points. Immigrants with legal status have been deported. Others have been arrested by agents at immigration courts and during routine administrative interviews. Federal judges have issued hundreds of orders to block the department’s actions, but Noem and her staff have ignored them.
The D.H.S. is currently under a partial shutdown after congressional Democrats refused to appropriate further funds without certain checks on the power of federal immigration agents. In this sense, Noem has achieved a rare feat of bringing together Democrats on a matter of immigration policy. But the most alarming fact of her political demise is that none of the department’s most egregious actions seemed to have been the reason that she was ultimately fired. What triggered Trump’s displeasure was the feebleness of Noem’s responses to mounting criticism. The story, in other words, had become about her—the shameless ad campaigns, the alleged affair, and, earlier this week, her shambolic appearance before Congress. Smelling blood, Republicans circled, accusing her of self-promotion and corruption. Her answers were canned and defensive.
In Noem’s place, Trump has nominated the Oklahoma senator Markwayne Mullin, a former M.M.A. fighter with a thin résumé and an excess of bravado. In a Senate hearing, in 2023, Mullin challenged the Teamsters president, Sean O’Brien, who was giving testimony, to a fistfight. “Stand your butt up,” Mullin said, as he rose from his seat. Bernie Sanders, who was chairing the hearing, ordered Mullin to sit down. “You’re a United States senator,” he told him, though Mullin continued to issue taunts. If Noem had a male counterpart, Trump deserves credit for finding him. ♦
