Kristi Noem’s $200 Million Mistake
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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.
Totally.
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.
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.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What was Kristi Noem's controversial ad campaign at DHS?
0:03–1:14
2
How did Kristi Noem's leadership style clash with DHS culture?
1:14–3:02
3
What were the early signs of trouble during Noem's tenure?
3:02–7:09
4
Why did Kristi Noem's approach to immigration enforcement raise concerns?
7:09–10:18
5
How did the Senate hearing impact Kristi Noem's position?
10:18–15:44
6
What were the implications of Noem's ad spending during her testimony?
15:44–19:28