Michelle Hackman

There were a lot of rumors as Trump won the election and during the transition that he would try to pick an immigration hawk, someone maybe from his first term.

It came as a total surprise when he picked Kristi Noem.

You know, she is a governor.

Governors are often a place that presidents turn when filling major cabinet positions.

But she's from South Dakota.

She had very limited experience with immigration there.

I start calling around to people to see what they think of her, and I very quickly realize that people inside the department who are not liberal, I mean, people who work in immigration enforcement, generally speaking, are fairly hawkish, are fairly sympathetic to the idea of deporting a lot of people.

They were complaining that Kristi Noem was sort of standing in their way and showboating in a way.

One early anecdote that they shared with me that really became emblematic for me of how she runs the department is a few days after taking office, she went on an ice raid.

And, you know, an ice raid, the whole point of an ice raid is that it's an element of surprise, right?

You need to catch someone at their house as they're leaving.

And so if they know you're there, they're not going to come out.

Well, Kristi Noem goes on this ice raid in New York.

She tweets a photo of herself wearing an ice cap

before the raid even starts, announcing that it's about to happen in New York.

By tweeting out this picture of herself by saying, we're about to do this big ICE raid in New York, people were tipped off, advocacy groups were tipped off, and the raid wasn't successful.

So back in March, I got invited to join her on her first international trip.

And it was a really important one because she was going to visit the really famous, the notorious prison in El Salvador, where the U.S.

sent all of those asylum seekers without any kind of trial.

I think it holds 15,000 people.