Kristi Noem Still Won’t Admit ICE Engages In Racial Profiling

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has been having a rough couple of months since the brutal, inhumane, and generally deplorable behavior of federal immigration agents deployed by the Trump administration — as well as DHS’s propensity towards lying about said behavior — was plainly exposed for the world to see, resulting in a PR nightmare for DHS and the White House. Well, things didn’t get any better for Noem during Tuesday’s Senate Judiciary Committee — which was almost as chaotic and contentious as U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi’s House Judiciary hearing last month — with even Senate Republicans getting sick and tired of Noem’s evasiveness and inability to answer direct questions.

But if there’s one moment during the hearing that is worth highlighting, it’s the moment when Noem was “introduced” to three U.S. citizens detained by immigration officials, including a man detained twice in Alabama, and the alleged racial profiling that led to these arrests, during questioning by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.).

From AL.com:

In the hearing, Noem did not answer a question from Blumenthal asking if she has met any of the U.S. citizens detained or arrested by immigration officials.

Blumenthal proceeded to introduce her to three such U.S. citizens including Leonardo Garcia Venegas, Marinar Martinez and Javier Ramirez.

Venegas was arrested twice by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in south Alabama last year.

“Do you know what your agents did to Leo Venegas? I’ll tell you,” Blumenthal said.

“On May 21 of last year, they entered the private property at a house that he was constructing without consent, without a warrant, illegally. Again, on June 12, they entered private property, a home where he was doing construction. He is a United States citizen, born in Florida. They seized him and ignored and disregarded his proof of citizenship.”

Noem replied that “in law enforcement operations across the country, there are times when U.S. citizens … may be arrested or detained until their identity is confirmed and that they haven’t committed a crime.”

What Noem didn’t say — and what she has persistently refused to admit since the start of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda was launched — is that the chances of a U.S. citizen being arrested and detained by immigration agents go up dramatically if said citizen is of Latino or Hispanic descent, or a Black person with an accent.

In other words: racial profiling.

In October, Venegas filed a federal lawsuit alleging that ICE routinely arrests workers and any individual who appears to be Latino during immigration raids, an accusation that mirrors that of a multitude of plaintiffs who have filed lawsuits against DHS and the Trump administration over the last year.

Allegations that immigration cops routinely engage in racial profiling have also been supported by local police officers in Minnesota, federal judges who have ruled the feds are racially profiling, and video footage that shows agents approaching people at their homes and workplaces, and telling them flat-out that they need to see proof of citizenship just “because of your accent.”

Trump administration officials have also defended agents’ so-called authority to detain and question people based on their occupations, accents, spoken languages, and other identifying factors that would mark them as immigrants and thus, potentially “illegal” immigrants. Noem — who has publicly scolded reporters for suggesting federal agents were targeting people based on race — recently told immigrants to keep proof of citizenship on their person at all times, as if to say being a brown person with an accent means one must be prepared to prove their legitimacy every moment of their lives that is spent on U.S. soil, whether they are U.S. citizens or not.

Anyway, let’s circle back to what Venegas is alleging.

More from AL.com:

The first raid occurred at 7 a.m. on May 21, 2025 in a subdivision of Foley, according to his lawsuit.

Venegas said he saw five men in camouflage jump over a property fence and run past a “no trespassing” sign. According to the suit, the agents had no warrant. It alleges they ran past the white and Black workers and chased the Latino workers.

As Venegas saw the agents “assault” his brother, who also worked there, the suit alleges, he pulled out his phone to record a video.

An officer approached Venegas and tackled him to the ground. He told the officer he would show his papers and that he was a citizen. Another officer ran over to help tackle him, according to the suit.

The officers pulled Venegas’s Alabama STAR ID out of his pocket and told him it was fake, according to the suit. He was arrested and not released for over an hour until an officer called to check on his Social Security number, the suit alleges.

As usual, DHS presented a different version of events.

“Leonardo Garcia Venegas attempted to obstruct and prevent the lawful arrest of an illegal alien,” the department wrote on X, accompanied by video of Blumenthal’s interview of Noem. “He put himself between law enforcement and the subject they were attempting to arrest, and he refused to comply with numerous verbal commands.”

In the past few months alone, the federal government has demonstrably been caught lying about the circumstances behind the ICE-involved killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis; the non-fatal shooting of a Venezuelan man in the Twin Cities area; and the non-fatal shooting of activist Marimar Martinez in Chicago. In all of these cases, DHS blamed the victims of the shootings and painted the agents as innocent law enforcement officials who werejust trying to do their jobs when they were brutally attacked by anti-ICE protesters, a claim the Trump administration has been making for a year without presenting evidence that it is true.

Conversely, video evidence has shown that federal agents are regularly the aggressors in violent confrontations with protesters whom they claimed they were attacked by has been readily available across social media, and, last year, a federal judge in Chicago even produced a series of videos that also prove as much.

On Tuesday, Noem was directly confronted with the fact that U.S. citizens of Latino or Hispanic descent have been targeted and detained by ICE, and she responded by essentially saying, “Sh-t happens,” while DHS reflexively responded by spinning a tale about citizens obstructing agents that no one has any reason to believe due to the government’s track record of repeating this narrative, whether there’s any observable truth to it or not.

Lie and deny, avoid accountability by pointing fingers elsewhere, and rinse and repeat: that’s how the Trump administration operates in all things, and the people are beyond tired of it, even some Republicans.

But when will it end?

SEE ALSO:

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