Who cares? That’s all I have to say after reading a lengthy article in New York magazine about Department of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and how she’s the face of the Trump police state, which also doesn’t exist. It’s a sordid tale that aims to cast the Trump administration as fraught with toxic politics, soap opera drama, and reported draconian policy pushes, as told by anonymous sources. It’s the full gauntlet: Noem was kooky and reckless as governor, she might be dating Corey Lewandowski, and she’s not qualified.
The piece begins with internal DHS strife. The second part is about the alleged romance between her and Lewandowski, followed by anecdotes about her governorship and how she’s considered an empty vessel, a ‘Yes’ woman, and a pretty face—Noem was contacted for comment and had the perfect response: This NYMag hit piece reads like a preteen rage-scrolling, then prompting ChatGPT for a screed on misogyny — complete with zero substance and maximum bullshit.”
She’s not wrong:
As soon as Trump entered office, Noem & Co. went to work forming a new anti-immigration regime, transforming DHS into the country’s most fearsome law-enforcement arm. It is now endangering the constitutional rights of citizens and noncitizens alike — and it is doing so openly, even proudly. During his first two weeks on the job, Trump signed an order that attempted to end birthright citizenship and another to begin preparing Guantánamo Bay to detain tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants. In March, the administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, claiming it could deport migrants without a hearing owing to an “invasion” of gang members from Venezuela. Later, a federal judge ordered planes carrying detainees to El Salvador to be returned to the U.S., but the planes continued on their flight in defiance of the judge’s ruling. On one of these flights was Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man who had been granted legal protection because of legitimate concerns for his safety. The Trump administration admitted Garcia’s deportation was a mistake but claimed there was nothing it could do about it now that he was no longer in U.S. custody; Garcia later claimed he was beaten and psychologically tortured, while other deportees have said they were sexually assaulted.
Back home, ICE grabbed Palestinian green-card holder Mahmoud Khalil and kept him for more than 100 days in a detention center in Jena, Louisiana. A judge later ruled his capture unconstitutional, and other detainees at Jena have complained of overcrowding, cells contaminated with feces, and being denied medication. DHS detained Mohsen Mahdawi, also a Palestinian green-card holder, at his citizenship interview; nabbed Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish Ph.D. student, off the streets in Massachusetts; and held an Irish tourist for more than three months after he overstayed his visa by three days. “Nobody is safe,” he told the Guardian. The DHS X account has encouraged Americans to “Report Foreign Invaders,” and cities including Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Chicago have become staging grounds for militarized immigration raids. “They are grabbing people who have brown skin or who speak with an accent or who speak another language and not people who are guilty of or are accused of perpetrating a crime,” Illinois governor J. B. Pritzker said in September.
New detention centers with macabre nicknames have started to spring up across the country: Alligator Alcatraz in Florida, the Cornhusker Clink in Nebraska, the Speedway Slammer in Indiana. ICE’s own inspectors found that migrants housed in a detention center in Fort Bliss in Texas had been subject to conditions that violated at least 60 federal standards, according to a report by the Washington Post, including many of the detainees being unable to contact their lawyers for weeks. South Korean workers detained in a raid on a Hyundai-LG factory in Georgia described being crammed into windowless rooms with few bathrooms and moldy beds, while ICE guards mocked them for being from “North Korea.” Democratic senator Jon Ossoff says his office has compiled credible reports of more than 500 human-rights abuses in immigration detention centers since the beginning of Trump’s term.
The Trump-friendly Supreme Court, in part through the use of its so-called shadow docket, has given DHS a green light to run rampant. The Court even reversed a judgment that blocked ICE agents from stopping people and questioning them solely based on factors like their ethnicity. As a result of all these changes, the number of illegal border crossings has plummeted, the number of detentions has hit record highs, and, according to DHS, 2 million undocumented immigrants have either left the country or been deported (though the number has not been independently verified) — and ICE hasn’t even fully utilized the funding increase that makes its annual budget larger than the FBI’s.
The drama with these people.
Behind the hyperbole and the liberal bias, the core of the mission remains the same: the DHS is rounding up people who shouldn’t be here and deporting them, which is what this agency should be doing. Since the start of the second Trump presidency, encounters with illegal aliens at the border are down 93 percent, daily apprehensions are down 96 percent, and zero illegal aliens have been released into the country over the past four months. Some 2 million illegals have exited the country thus far. Under Noem, she’s saved taxpayers some $13.2 billion since she took the helm at DHS. On the seas, the Coast Guard has taken it to drug cartels, seizing record amounts of drug shipments, 76,000 pounds from one seizure alone from the Cutter Hamilton.
Sorry, libs, I like what the DHS is doing. Call me crazy, but it looks like they’re—I don’t know—enforcing the law.
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