The chaos, incompetence, and alleged lawbreaking that defined Kristi Noem’s tenure at the Department of Homeland Security have been laid bare in a bombshell new investigation.
The New York Times article, published Tuesday, draws on interviews with more than 80 current and former DHS employees and Justice Department officials.
It amounts to a sweeping indictment of the agency under Noem, 54, who was fired by Donald Trump on March 5 after a controversial 14-month run. As the Daily Beast has reported, Trump’s aides had wanted her gone for months before he finally acted, with the final straw reportedly being her insistence, under oath, that he had personally signed off on her $220 million vanity ad campaign.
The hits in the Times feature come thick and fast. A former ICE field director describes how Trump’s deputy chief of staff and immigration czar, Stephen Miller, told a room full of agency chiefs that targeting lists were irrelevant. “There is no list,” Miller said, according to the Times. “Everyone is fair game.”
One former senior ICE officer says that when agents fatally shot unarmed Minneapolis mother Renee Nicole Good on Jan. 7, 2026, Noem cleared the shooting as justified within an hour, before any investigation had taken place. The officer says the exoneration’s speed sent a message to agents in the field that they could “push the limits.”
The testimony about Noem’s arrival at the agency is withering. A former associate counsel at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services recalls her first DHS town hall, at which she entered to the theme song “Hot Mama,” spoke for a few minutes, took no questions, and left. “It felt like a South Park moment,” he told the Times.
The report reveals staff rumors that Corey Lewandowski—the former Trump campaign manager who served as Noem’s de facto chief of staff and is her rumored long-term lover—prowled the DHS corridors checking nameplates on empty desks, prompting terrified employees to leave Post-it notes reading: “In a meeting. In the restroom.”
The report also exposes what insiders describe as a systematic effort to turn asylum interviews into an ICE trap. A former asylum officer tells the Times that agents were instructed to keep applicants in their interviews longer if ICE had not yet arrived to arrest them. “They were being made part of a setup,” he said. He retired as a result.
Separately, a senior ICE officer describes agents blocking an unidentified man into a car, driving him to a secure location, and only then realizing they had detained the wrong person.
Underlying it all is a damning statistic. While the administration repeatedly claimed to be targeting the “worst of the worst,” ICE data shows that arrests of people with no criminal record at all surged 770 percent under Trump, against a 37 percent rise in arrests of those with violent records. Only around 5 percent of those taken into ICE custody had any violent conviction.
Noem’s replacement, Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin, 48, was confirmed by the Senate last month and has pledged to adopt a different approach. At his confirmation hearing, he committed to requiring judicial warrants rather than DHS-issued administrative warrants to enter homes or businesses, and said he wanted DHS to stop dominating the news.
He has also privately supported an inspector general investigation into how Noem and Lewandowski handled contracts, the Times notes.
The Daily Beast has contacted DHS and the White House for comment.
