Kristi Noem Is the Villain DHS Was Made For

Before the 2024 election, the idea that Kristi Noem would someday head the Department of Homeland Security seemed beyond unlikely. But her cruelty once handed this power was foreseeable. If Noem’s name rang any bells for most people before the Senate confirmed her to head DHS this January (to their enduring shame), it was because she shot her 14-month-old dog to death in a gravel pit and included the grisly scene in her election-year memoir. She defended the book, No Going Back, as “a blueprint for America of what citizens can do here to take their country back.” In the past year, she has emerged in what will likely go down in history as her true form: an entity first caught on camera in March 2025 in a torture prison in El Salvador, and now shorthanded as “ICE Barbie.” Heavily made-up, styled in a tight white shirt, $50,000 Rolex watch, and an Immigration and Customs Enforcement ball cap atop long, flowing locks, she stood in front of cells filled with men imprisoned on her orders, and delivered a direct-to-camera threat to immigrants in the United States: “This facility,” she said, “is one of the tools in our toolkit that we will use if you commit crimes against the American people.”

Under Noem, ICE has become the most lavishly-funded law enforcement agency in the United States. ICE agents have arrested around 220,000 people, between Trump taking office and October 15. (That doesn’t include arrests by Border Patrol agents, a separate DHS agency who often accompany ICE; since January 20, the administration has claimed to have arrested 595,000 immigrants.) On any given day, Noem’s DHS is responsible for holding around 65,000 people in immigration detention—a record high. Breaking another record, ICE has detained at least 600 children this year. The agency claimed to have deported more than 600,000 people since Trump returned to office. Noem has overseen the opening and expansion of several new immigrant detention facilities and camps; two Florida facilities notorious for employing torture techniques borrowed from CIA black sites are now under her purview. Other DHS agencies have indefinitely suspended immigration applications from a growing number of countries Trump has targeted, and abruptly canceled immigration ceremonies. Noem has purchased planes for DHS to use for deportation flights, including two new luxury G700 Gulfstream jets for $200 million, and ten Boeing 737’s from a bankrupt budget airline, each without an engine. DHS press releases are now filled with open taunting of immigrants; their social media accounts are dominated by white nationalist slop. Noem has since admitted she directed the removal—more a mass abduction than deportation—of 261 people to the prison camp in El Salvador in March, in defiance of a court order.

While DHS anti-immigration agents may hide their faces in balaclavas, Noem is front-and-center promoting the agency and Trump’s promised mass deportations. ICE Barbie is somewhere between the enabler and the cover for the agency’s campaign of “assault and kidnapping”—the words used by one woman who was grabbed by masked, armed agents on her commute in Chicago. Tens of thousands of people have been taken by masked and armed men working for DHS on the streets of Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Baltimore, Minneapolis, New Orleans, Charlotte, and others. Thousands of people across the country have been vigilant in identifying and tracking these agents as they terrorize their neighbors. In the last few weeks alone, federal immigration agents loosed an attack dog on a Washington state resident, according to his senator; chased a Louisiana woman (a U.S. citizen) while she was walking home from the corner store; unleashed pepper spray on residents in a Somali neighborhood in Minneapolis; violently yanked a Key Largo woman from her car on her way to work, still wearing her hospital scrubs; and chased a man out of a Home Depot parking lot and into the street, where he was reportedly hit by a car.

Noem has appeared here and there in the streets, sometimes comically, but she seems to prefer more controlled settings. The costumed appearance in the El Salvador torture prison was not an anomaly. Presiding over the opening of an American concentration camp in the Everglades in July, Noem donned a white vest, dark blue skinny jeans, and a pure white MAGA ball cap with gold letters. Before touring empty chain-link cells, Noem said that news organizations should be prosecuted for reporting on an app meant to track ICE operations. (In December, the makers of one such app, ICEBlock, sued the Trump administration for having pressured Apple to remove it from their app store.) Noem has also enriched herself and her circle with this authoritarian imagery, starring in a series of DHS anti-immigrant ads, made by a company with long-standing ties to Noem, as ProPublica has reported, who were handed the $200 million DHS contract without competition.

The Kristi Noem of today, posing in front of cages, doesn’t much resemble the woman who arrived in Congress in 2011. Noem wrote upon leaving the House in 2019 that she “didn’t go to make a career out of Washington.” That rings false, today. As she moved closer to Trump in recent years, she also began to take the form of any number of women he might see on Newsmax or around Mar-a-Lago: long, highlighted, barrel-curled hair framing high-cheekbones, full lips, and eyes that appear to have receded behind lash extensions.

Midway through Noem’s transformation, on the CPAC stage in 2021, she introduced herself as a new grandmother, who just had the same deeply-held American values as anyone else in the room. Noem railed with only minimal conviction against what she said were the two biggest threats facing the country: “Marxist indoctrinations that they are teaching our children in our schools,” and what was “happening down at our southern border.” She added, a bit clumsily, “A nation without borders is a nation without laws and is not a nation at all.” In retrospect, it’s clear that her job there, as now, was to sell a fifty-year conservative political project based on xenophobia and Christian nationalism, convincing onlookers that Trump would deliver that vision in the future as he had in the past—as would she, if given the chance.

Noem is no fan of American history, it seems, outside of referencing 1776 as part of her anti-“indoctrination” campaign against history education. She also may not want to know about the long American tradition of white women assuming political power through promoting their God-given role as the guardian of national purity. ICE Barbie would fit in well with some of the women temperance and suffrage leaders, who saw liquor as a vehicle for immigrant vice and crime, and resented that the franchise might be extended to any new male citizen while America’s real daughters went without a vote. ICE Barbie is an aesthetic, but also an argument: demonstrating that Noem loses not one drop of white feminine virtue even when daring to bring order and discipline to what she and her followers see as the most despicable and violent places.

Noem debuted the ICE Barbie look as part of her public assumption of the helm of DHS, a young agency marked through its brief history by a multitude of fuck-ups and abuses of power, ranging from its lethal insistence that white men cannot be terrorists to its catastrophic failures to respond to climate change-fueled disasters. As part of the Bush administration’s response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, “Homeland Security” was born, a new agency that would now encompass everything from emergency management and natural disaster response, as well as border policing and routine immigration applications. DHS was unified less by mission than by the nationalist turn of the war on terror. ICE was an invention of this agency, which in turn institutionalized the idea that immigrants posed a national security threat. Trump and Noem did not build this. It will not be unmade merely by their departure alone—though it should be.

Noem now seems to be falling out of favor with Trump, or at least with his anti-immigration go-to Stephen Miller. Reports circulated earlier this month that the administration is considering replacing her. At a wild hearing in early December, a number of Democratic lawmakers called for her resignation to her face; Noem told one, “I will consider your asking me to resign as an endorsement of my work.” But while it might be tempting to dismiss her unfathomably cruel DHS tenure as try-hard MAGA toadying, or as rank incompetence, she’s actually well suited for this a job. At DHS, Noem can keep doing whatever it is her job is without much of a break at all from the agency’s violent history.