Former secretary of homeland security under President Donald Trump. A former governor of South Dakota, she had no law-enforcement experience before joining the department. She was fired on March 5th 2026 after a controversy over a $220m advertising campaign—one ad featured her on a horse in front of Mount Rushmore telling immigrants: "Break our laws, we'll punish you." Noem claimed Trump had signed off on the campaign; he denied it. Trump announced her dismissal in a lengthy Truth Social post focused largely on her successor, Markwayne Mullin, a senator from Oklahoma.
Noem oversaw DHS's transformation into an entity focused first and foremost on immigration policing. Congress directed nearly $170bn to the department's immigration agencies. Corey Lewandowski, her right-hand man, created an environment of fear and intimidation within the department, according to officials who left. She posed with a gun alongside ICE agents on the southern border.
She and defence secretary Pete Hegseth were given a deadline of April 20th 2025 to recommend whether the Insurrection Act should be invoked for immigration enforcement; the deadline passed without clarity on how the administration would proceed.
By May 2025 America's immigration detention centres had reached capacity: roughly 49,000 detainees against a congressional allocation for 41,500 beds. Stewart Detention Centre, America's second-biggest immigration facility, in rural Georgia, had roughly 1,750 beds but was holding around 2,200 people; newcomers slept on the floor. ICE's acting director, Todd Lyons, called for a deportation system that functions "like Amazon Prime, but with human beings".
Noem filmed herself at a grotesquely overcrowded megaprison in El Salvador to which roughly 280 immigrants were sent in March and April 2025. She was wearing a $50,000 Rolex.
On May 27th 2025 Noem addressed a rally in Jasionka, Poland, days before the presidential run-off, urging Poles to elect Karol Nawrocki and implying that American troops would remain only if Poles chose a leader willing to work with Trump.
By late January 2026 two Republican senators, Thom Tillis and Lisa Murkowski, had called for Noem's resignation over the handling of a Minneapolis crackdown. A rush to train thousands of new ICE recruits meant that many agents sent into cities were ill-prepared to deal with protests.
Two days after being fired, Noem was thanking Trump for a new assignment as special envoy, hosting the first meeting of the "Shield of the Americas", a hitherto non-existent coalition of right-leaning countries in the western hemisphere.
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