Chapter 1: What was Kristi Noem's controversial ad campaign at DHS?
Last year, a splashy ad campaign featuring Kristi Noem, then head of the Department of Homeland Security, started showing up on TV.
Why do I love these wide open spaces? They remind me of why our forefathers came here.
Noem sits tall on a horse. She's wearing chaps, a cowboy hat. The granite faces of Mount Rushmore rise behind her.
I'm Kristi Noem. From the cowboys who tamed the West...
The ads were directed at people thinking of illegally immigrating to the U.S. It was a warning not to come. You cross the border illegally, we'll find you.
Break our laws, we'll punish you.
These TV spots were mostly in English. And the campaign was pretty pricey, costing more than $200 million. Our colleague Michelle Hackman says this campaign came to define Noam's unconventional tenure at DHS.
It's a long, glossy ad. It glorifies America, but it glorifies her too.
It almost felt like she wasn't just running the show at DHS. She was like literally, she was like starring in the show at DHS.
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Chapter 2: How did Kristi Noem's leadership style clash with DHS culture?
That's exactly how I would describe it. And she spent $200 million on these ads. I mean, that's a huge sum.
President Trump fired Noem last week. Her tenure was dogged by controversy. But in the end?
Of all the things she did, this ad campaign might have been the one that ultimately led to her downfall.
Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudson. It's Monday, March 9th. Coming up on the show, inside Kristi Noem's rocky tenure at DHS. When Kristi Noem started running DHS, she took on a huge mandate to execute the president's signature domestic campaign promise.
I mean, President Trump ran on the idea of doing a mass deportation. He was saying he wanted to deport, you know, 10 or 15 million people. And naturally, the person who was going to become the face of that was going to be his DHS secretary.
Why did Trump pick Noam to lead DHS?
You know, it's one of those things where Trump is looking for people who... sort of are mirroring his TV-friendly style. He loves to see people on TV defending him, going out promoting his agenda, being a little confrontational. But I think, frankly, people were puzzled by the choice.
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Chapter 3: What were the early signs of trouble during Noem's tenure?
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.
Once she took the job, Michelle says Nome's camera-ready leadership style clashed with the culture at DHS.
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.
This was part of a pattern. Noam often put herself front and center at DHS.
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. And she was like walking through very cavalierly.
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Chapter 4: Why did Kristi Noem's approach to immigration enforcement raise concerns?
Her top advisor, Corey Lewandowski, ended up firing the pilot, the head of the crew, for forgetting her blanket. And the craziest part is, once they landed, they realized they had no one to fly them home, and so they had to reinstate the pilot.
All over a blanket, okay.
Yeah.
The complaints weren't just about Noam, though. Michelle learned there were also concerns about Corey Lewandowski, her top advisor.
Corey Lewandowski was, you know, Trump's very first campaign manager. He's been at Trump's side, you know, ever since maybe 2015. Trump perceives him as very loyal. And we reported that Kristi Noem and Corey Lewandowski, who are both married, are in a romantic relationship. And they've done, you know, very little inside DHS to hide that relationship from people. He is always by her side.
He is her top advisor, right?
Noam and Lewandowski have both denied reports of an affair. A DHS spokeswoman said the department, quote, doesn't waste time with salacious, baseless gossip. What really concerned people inside DHS, sources told Michelle, was that Lewandowski was not technically a full-time government employee.
So he is something called a special government employee. Listeners may be familiar with that because it's the same designation Elon Musk got. It's supposed to be for sort of specialized private sector expertise. It's supposed to be for a short stint inside the government. But Corey Lewandowski still had a role in the private sector.
for his own consulting firm while also effectively serving as the chief of staff at DHS. Now, he was supposed to serve only 130 days, but he played all sorts of games to extend that out. He would basically follow other people into DHS buildings so he didn't have to swipe himself in. So that way he wouldn't count a day.
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Chapter 5: How did the Senate hearing impact Kristi Noem's position?
There are a lot of very big checks. And $100,000 in government really doesn't buy you very much. And so what's happening over the last few months is that contracts were just piling up on Kristi Noem's desk to the point where, you know, all sorts of things very nearly expired or did expire.
And then came the ICE operation in Minnesota.
Well, it has been a noisy night here in downtown Minneapolis as protesters have gathered outside the canopy by...
How would you say Kristi Noem handled Minnesota?
She, you know, for months, she had been promoting, again, a sort of really showy, confrontational form of immigration enforcement. She engaged, you know, this guy named Greg Bovino in the Border Patrol to lead these operations where he would send agents out in huge roving bands to look for people. I mean, very different from how
traditional immigration enforcement is done, where you have sort of specific targets and it's kind of limited. And you saw that sort of extremely over-the-top confrontational approach culminate in two deadly shootings of American citizens who were, you know, Renee Goode was driving a car and Alex Preddy was out protesting.
And you immediately have Kristi Noem go on TV and say, you know, Alex Preddy committed an act of domestic terrorism.
This individual who came with weapons and ammunition to stop a law enforcement operation of federal law enforcement officers committed an act of domestic terrorism. That's the facts.
And then, you know, a video comes out of him and he's on his knees getting shot from behind his head. I mean, it was extremely incongruous with what Americans saw with their own eyes.
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Chapter 6: What were the implications of Noem's ad spending during her testimony?
Yes, sir.
We went through the legal processes. Did it correct? Did the president know you were going to do this? Yes.
He did? Mm-hmm. Yes. Okay. Why was that a fatal mistake?
In Trump world, there's a lot you can get away with. But one sort of cardinal rule is that you never blame Trump or you never implicate Trump when you've made a mistake. We were told that when Trump saw that she had implicated him, that is when he snapped and made the decision and said, she's done. We need to find a replacement for her.
Trump later told Reuters that he, quote, never knew anything about Noem's ad spends. Noem has said publicly before that Trump was aware of her campaign. Last Thursday, just a day after she testified, Noem was out at DHS. Her advisor, Corey Lewandowski, is also leaving. The president announced on Truth Social that he was moving Noem to something he called the Shield of the Americas.
It's almost like she's an envoy to Latin America so she can continue some of the work that she was doing, fighting drug cartels, transnational gangs, the things that she liked to talk a lot about as DHS secretary. But, you know, it's not a cabinet position. It's also, you know, something that basically is redundant because we have ambassadors all over Latin America.
And, you know, Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, Latin America is sort of his personal sweet spot.
The person taking over Noam's role at DHS is a man named Mark Wayne Mullen.
Mark Wayne Mullen is a senator from Oklahoma. This guy, Ryan, is a former MMA fighter, and fighting seems to be sort of the way that he approaches his current job, and I think that's how we should expect him to come into this new one.
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