Kristi Noem Gave Huge Contract to Company Accused of People Smuggling

Outgoing Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem gave a border wall contract to a company that illegally smuggled workers into the country, provided them guns, and ignored them when they got involved in a shootout. 

The Daily Beast reports that the Texas-based SLSCO Ltd. has two contracts with DHS worth a total of $1 billion to build the border wall in Laredo and Del Rio, Texas. Noem personally approved the contracts. The company also has a contract to build the “Alligator Alcatraz” detention facility in Florida, and during the first Trump administration, won bids of close to $2 billion to build the border wall. 

But SLSCO, a major Republican donor, was accused in court of smuggling Mexican nationals into the country as workers, later giving them guns to work as guards. Two of the company’s former security contractors, an ex-FBI special agent and a former sheriff’s deputy in San Diego, filed a lawsuit against SLSCO over alleged “human and weapons smuggling” over the U.S. border with Mexico. 

The lawsuit states that the pair started working for the company in 2019 and discovered migrants working illegally for SLSCO at border wall sites in southern California, as well as armed Mexican nationals working as guards. In July of that year, those guards reportedly got into a firefight with a different group of migrants who were trying to steal from SLSCO construction sites. 

But after the two contractors raised the issue with their superiors, nothing happened. The ex-FBI agent then told the bureau about the smuggling and the shootout, and shortly afterward, the two contractors were fired, which they allege was retaliation. But the lawsuit never made it to court because the two plaintiffs dismissed the case voluntarily. SLSCO doesn’t seem to have ever commented publicly about it, according to The Daily Beast.  

It’s yet another black mark on Noem’s disastrous tenure at DHS. The agency shot and killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis on her watch while carrying out the Trump administration’s violent mass deportation agenda. Noem also faced criticism for hiring an eight-day-old company for a $220 million ad campaign for ICE, spending millions on luxury jets, and buying 2,500 trucks for ICE that the agency can’t even use, among numerous other misdeeds. What other ill-advised purchases has she saddled taxpayers with?