Since being named U.S. Homeland Security Secretary, Kristi Noem has repeatedly vowed to work “every day” to boot illegal migrants out of the country.
And she boasted about her latest clear-out on Tuesday, although perhaps not the sort her MAGA voter base might have expected...
Instead, Noem told her social media followers that, rather than securing the borders from foreign criminals, she had spent the day emptying an old lockup.
“The day finally came… we cleaned out the campaign storage unit late this afternoon,” she wrote on Facebook and Instagram, saying it had been “stuffed FULL!” of “signs, posts, pictures, and memories,” and thanking loyal aides who “propped me up on hard days.”
“Campaigns are hard. But the people make it worth it and I’ve run every one of my races committed that I wouldn’t let them down. [That] I’d work hard... And I did.”
Noem’s office dismissed suggestions that she was taking the day off.
“Whether it be ICE enforcement operations at dawn, answering calls in the middle of the night to coordinate the Coast Guard response to the DCA plane crash, international trips to secure deals with foreign countries to accept more deportation flights, or trips to the border to meet with CBP officers, Secretary Noem is working around the clock to make America safe again,” Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement.
In recent months, Noem has cast herself as an all-gas-no-brakes Cabinet officer, repeatedly pledging to “continue fighting every day” to secure the U.S. borders and keep America “safe.”
Noem, who was confirmed in January as DHS secretary, oversees sprawling agencies from FEMA and the Coast Guard to ICE and the Secret Service.
However, the recent tidy-up session is not, strictly speaking, part of running the Department of Homeland Security.
Noem’s tough-on-immigration brand has helped spawn the mocking nickname “ICE Barbie,” for her posed photoshoots while on ICE raids in combat gear and full make-up.
That was turbocharged by a recent South Park episode that portrayed her as a cosmetic-obsessed enforcer who brags about shooting dogs—an exaggeration rooted in her own 2024 memoir where she confessed to killing her dog, Cricket.
After the South Park episode, she blasted the satire as “lazy” and “petty.”
