How Kristi Noem, Trump’s homeland security pick, became an immigration ‘zealot’
Gov. Kristi L. Noem was about to seize the spotlight, and she wanted to make the most of it.
In June 2021, the South Dakota Republican was preparing to announce that her state would be the first to send National Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexico border in response to an appeal from Texas. What’s more, she was mobilizing the state’s forces in a highly unusual way – bankrolled by an out-of-state billionaire.
After a last-minute conversation with the governor, Noem’s chief of staff changed her quote in a news release drawn up for the announcement – “to represent more accurately her stance on this issue,” as her top adviser wrote in an internal email. No longer would Noem praise border-state governors. Instead, she would declare bluntly: “The border is a national security crisis.”
The edits are included in hundreds of pages of emails and other documents released by the National Guard in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. The documents show how the governor and her team positioned her as a hard-liner on immigration despite the 1,500 miles separating South Dakota from the southern border.
The efforts, beginning with the deployment of about 50 members of the National Guard in the summer of 2021, intensified over the next three years. Noem ordered two additional deployments, paid for by state taxpayers. And she steadily escalated her rhetoric. In an address before a joint session of her state’s legislature earlier this year, the governor declared: “South Dakota is directly affected by this invasion. We are affected by cartel presence on our tribal reservations; by the spread of drugs and human trafficking throughout our communities; and by the drain on our resources at the local, state and federal level.”
Politically, the work paid off. President-elect Donald Trump earlier this month picked Noem to lead the Department of Homeland Security, a sprawling agency of more than 260,000 people charged with border enforcement, disaster response and other law enforcement responsibilities.
“Kristi has been very strong on Border Security,” Trump said in announcing his choice.
A Noem spokesman did not make her available for an interview and did not respond to questions. A Trump spokeswoman called Noem “brilliant” and praised her for having “deployed her state’s resources to stop the Southern Border Invasion.”
Throughout the country, Noem’s focus on the border has endeared her to the Republican grass roots. The Shelby County GOP, in Tennessee, honored Noem at its annual Lincoln Day dinner over the summer, said the local party’s chairman, Cary Vaughn, because, “She’s a great zealot and advocate for fighting for border control.”
A Tennessee billionaire and Republican donor, Willis Johnson, was so supportive of Noem’s efforts that he funded the initial 2021 deployment to the tune of $1 million. The private financing raised eyebrows in Washington, where congressional staffers questioned its viability, emails show, and drew a rebuke from Democrats in South Dakota.
The deployments all together cost about $3.3 million, prompted questions about the legality of the private funding and helped fuel a bitter dispute between Noem and South Dakota’s Native American tribes after she alleged that cartel activity on reservations justified the National Guard’s deployment. Documents and interviews show the governor’s team prioritized the public image she was crafting while sometimes paying less attention to the minutiae of her policy – announcing the initial deployment before fully verifying its legal validity.
Noem, a rancher and farmer who spent eight years in Washington as a member of Congress before being elected governor in 2018, has often used her perch in Pierre, a small capital city along the Missouri River, to insert herself into the national conversation.
Amid a drug crisis in 2019, she spent nearly $500,000 in state funds on an awareness campaign whose slogan – “Meth. We’re on it.” – was meant to convey a proactive response to drug abuse but prompted widespread ridicule because of its indelicate wording. In 2020, she bucked public health consensus and boasted of her state’s hands-off response to the covid pandemic as South Dakota recorded the second-highest number of population-adjusted infections in the country. And this year, amid speculation that she could be Trump’s running mate, she released a memoir in which she described shooting to death her family’s dog because the 14-month-old wirehaired pointer was “untrainable,” resulting in bipartisan backlash.
But it’s the claim she staked to border security that is especially relevant to the portfolio she’ll assume if confirmed as homeland security secretary. And it points to the kind of boundary-pushing tactics Noem may be willing to spearhead in carrying out Trump’s promise of mass deportations.
“She’s always getting in front of TV cameras, flying to different parts of the country, trying to be in the spotlight,” said Aaron Aylward, a Republican state representative and chairman of the South Dakota legislature’s Freedom Caucus, modeled on the hard-right faction in Washington. “That’s not a criticism, but it was pretty obvious another position was coming her way. I wish her the best in that position.”
A donation stands out
The South Dakota National Guard traces its history to 1862, when it served as a militia for the Dakota Territory. Since then, its members have seen combat in both World Wars and in U.S. campaigns in both Iraq and Afghanistan. The 4,200-member unit has also participated in federal operations at the U.S.-Mexico border – a routine practice under presidents of both parties.
As illegal borders crossings reached record highs in 2021, Noem argued that the effects – in the form of drugs, crime and overstretched public resources – burdened the whole country and required use of state military forces. Other Republican governors soon followed her lead in dispatching troops of their own accord, not as part of a federal request as is typical.
South Dakota’s troops conducted observation along the Rio Grande between Del Rio and McAllen, Texas, according to internal emails. They were armed with assault rifles, according to a recommendation included in the emails, but advised that immigrant detention was beyond their remit, instead falling to U.S. Border Patrol.
To National Guard leaders deployed to the border, the mission was worth it: It aided efforts to secure the border in a moment of genuine crisis and lightened the load, even modestly, on overwhelmed Texas and U.S. authorities.
“Overall, this mission is something Soldiers are proud to be a part of, especially those with law enforcement affiliation,” wrote a Guard leader in a July 2021 email released under the Freedom of Information Act, explaining that the South Dakota unit acted as “an extra sensor,” allowing Border Patrol to focus on more serious cartel activity.
The initial mission cost about $1.5 million, which covered salaries, flights, lodging and 11 Humvees, among other equipment. That exceeded the $1 million in funds provided by Johnson, the Tennessee billionaire, and left South Dakota taxpayers with a bill of about $500,000 for that first deployment, the first of three ordered by Noem.
The donation came from a family foundation in Franklin, Tennessee, funded by Johnson, the founder and former chief executive of a vehicle auction company. A foundation tax filing identifies the purpose of the $1 million donation: “to assist in the best interest of the state of South Dakota.” Johnson has donated widely to Republican candidates, including more than $1 million in recent years to pro-Trump political committees, according to federal records. In 2022, he contributed $25,000 to a group supporting Noem. He did not respond to a request for comment.
Noem told reporters at the time of the initial deployment that she hardly knew Johnson, saying, “It really was a surprise when he gave me that phone call and said that he wanted to help support the state of South Dakota.”
Emails show Noem didn’t wait for her staff to iron out the details, including the legality of the private donation, before publicizing her plans. On the day of the announcement, a policy adviser to South Dakota’s senior Republican senator, John Thune, raised concerns about the arrangement in an email to National Guard leaders. The private donation “stood out,” he wrote, asking, “Are you able to provide information on that authority and the reimbursement process, and whether that will cover all related costs and benefits?” A Thune spokesman declined to comment.
The next day, the deputy secretary of the state’s public safety department wrote in an internal email that state officials were working out some details about the donation, including that it would not cover Guard salaries directly but instead go into the state’s emergency and disaster fund, which would cover the deployment. “Can you do some more leg work on this?” he asked another state official.
That fund, according to South Dakota law, is designed for disasters and emergencies “in any part of the state.” But Noem’s advisers, including the head of the National Guard, known as the adjutant general, described the situation at the southern border as a disaster bearing down directly on South Dakota. In an email to Noem aides, the adjutant general, Jeffrey Marlette, proposed that Noem describe her authority this way: “As Governor, I hold my role as Commander in Chief of our Soldiers and Airmen as a sacred bond, to only ask them to deploy when it is absolutely essential to preserving our way of life.”
“This is a different approach,” Marlette added, “but I think it delivers the Governor’s important messages and defeats the media’s misguided assumptions that this is political, illegal or not within her powers.”
Marlette, who retired last year, said in an interview that he wanted Noem to be clear about her aims, because he understood that the private donation risked creating the “appearance that the National Guard was for hire,” which, he emphasized, was “not the case.”
Democrats in the state legislature blasted the arrangement, arguing in a letter to the governor’s office that “privatized deployments set dangerous precedent for further political use of our National Guard.”
The governor digs in
Confusion about funding for the border mission didn’t end when soldiers shipped off to Texas.
Weeks into the 2021 deployment, National Guard leaders were still trying to ascertain whether Texas would reimburse South Dakota for the mission’s remaining costs, according to internal emails. No reimbursement ever came through, the governor later confirmed.
The volume of activity documented by South Dakota’s soldiers varied widely, according to internal Guard documents. Some days, they observed hundreds of migrants attempting to cross the border. At other points, they went as many as five days without any encounters. “Very slow day,” stated one situation report prepared by the National Guard.
An especially traumatic moment arrived in August 2021, when a sergeant identified a child who had crossed the river and wasn’t breathing. The sergeant attempted “life prolonging care,” according to a situation report, but ultimately “word was received the child was pronounced dead at the hospital.”
As the deployment concluded in September, the private funding remained controversial. The National Guard recommended “not having welcome home ceremony with media etc due to the nature of the publicity received from private donor,” according to internal emails.
Any discomfort among Noem advisers about publicizing the Guard’s activities disappeared two years later, when Noem ordered another mission to the border in September 2023 and took to Facebook to post photos of herself with gun-toting Guard members. “If Joe Biden and Kamala Harris would enforce the law and secure our border, Governors wouldn’t have to do their job for them,” she wrote.
In January of this year, Noem convened a joint session of the state’s legislature to discuss her ongoing efforts to deploy troops and other state resources to the border. In a 15-minute speech, she described the border as a “war zone” and likened the movement of migrants into the United States to a military attack.
“Every state is now a border state,” she argued.
In South Dakota, law enforcement officials offered differing accounts of whether activity at the border affects their distant communities.
In Minnehaha County, the state’s most populous jurisdiction, which includes Sioux Falls, 85 to 95 percent of the fentanyl emanates from across the southern border, estimated the county sheriff, Michael Milstead, who also chairs the National Sheriffs’ Association’s drug enforcement committee. The county’s chief prosecutor, Republican Daniel Haggar, deferred to the sheriff on the source of the drugs and said he lacked other statistics to fill in the picture. “When people are committing crimes in Minnehaha County, I don’t really care where they’re from,” Haggar said.
In Pennington County, which includes Rapid City and has the second-highest population in the state, the office of the chief prosecutor, who is also a Republican, said there isn’t data connecting a rise in drug charges to the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border. A spokeswoman for the prosecutor’s office, Katy Urban, also said the county hasn’t seen an increase in violence committed by undocumented immigrants.
In an effort to connect lapses in border security to problems in South Dakota, Noem asserted that Mexican drug cartels were using the state’s Native American reservations – which exist outside the jurisdiction of state and local law enforcement – as bases of operation. The state is home to extensive tribal lands, including the Pine Ridge Reservation, south of Rapid City.
Noem said the cartels and affiliated gang members “have been successful in recruiting tribal members to join their criminal activity” – a claim that tribal leaders contest. Her statements infuriated those leaders, whose relationships with Noem were already frayed. In the days after her address, she was banned from the Pine Ridge Reservation by Oglala Sioux Tribe President Frank Star Comes Out. Other tribes followed suit in the coming months.
In an interview, Star Comes Out said Noem was exploiting legitimate public safety concerns voiced by the tribe, which has sued the federal government to help buttress its underfunded law enforcement operation. He said drug use and crime are problems on the reservation just as they are elsewhere in the state, but that there was no basis for Noem’s allegations that tribal lands had become forward operating posts for Mexican cartels.
“It was just a way of trying to get attention,” Star Comes Out said.
In a statement responding to her banishment, Noem said, “It is unfortunate that President Star Comes Out chose to bring politics into a discussion regarding the effects of our federal government’s failure to enforce federal laws at the southern border and on tribal lands.”
Meanwhile, the Republican-dominated state legislature moved to resolve any doubt about how further border missions would be funded – by South Dakota taxpayers. Earlier this year, the legislature adopted an amendment to an appropriations bill to provide an additional $2.35 million to cover the second deployment and a third that Noem would soon launch.
The original version of the bill, addressing funding for emergencies and disasters, specified that those were events “impacting this state.” The final version approved in February, with the added funding for the border deployments, simply dropped that language.
Chris Dehghanpoor contributed to this report.