DHS Secretary Kristi Noem spent the past week doing something her critics apparently find intolerable: her job. While Congress fumbled through a partial government shutdown largely over how to fund her department, while Minneapolis smoldered from anti-ICE unrest, and while House Democrats staged "shadow hearings" to build an impeachment case against her, Noem was on a four-day swing through Mississippi, Texas, Arizona, and North Dakota — inspecting storm damage, meeting with Border Patrol agents, and standing along the border wall in Nogales to deliver a message that has clearly rattled the establishment.
The message: the border is more secure than it has been in decades, deportations are running at historic levels, and she isn't going anywhere.
In an interview with Fox News Digital conducted along the border wall in Nogales, Arizona, Noem laid out the deportation figures that define her tenure so far. The topline: over 3 million people removed from the country since the current administration took office. That breaks down into roughly 700,000 detained and physically removed, with over 2.3 million self-deporting — many of them incentivized by a program offering a $2,600 payment and a flight home.
"You know, you send the message around the world that America is now going to be enforcing its laws and making sure that if you're in this country illegally, that you should go home, and we've been incentivizing that through a $2,600 payment and a flight."
The self-deportation wave is the part of this story that rarely gets covered. Enforcement isn't just about agents and handcuffs — it's about credibility. When people around the world believe the United States will actually enforce its immigration laws, millions make the rational decision to leave voluntarily. That is deterrence working exactly as intended, as Fox News reports.
For context, DHS says more illegal immigrants crossed the southern border in a single average month under former President Biden than have crossed during Noem's entire tenure. That comparison alone should end most of the arguments against the current enforcement policy. It won't, of course, but it should.
The most politically charged element surrounding Noem right now isn't the border — it's Minneapolis. Operation Metro Surge, launched primarily in response to a fraud scheme involving members of the Somali community in Minnesota, has resulted in an estimated 4,000 criminal illegal immigrant apprehensions since the beginning of the year. Minneapolis, a self-declared sanctuary city where local authorities offer only minimal cooperation to federal immigration officers, became the epicenter of violent clashes between agitators and federal agents.
Two U.S. citizens — Renee Good and Alex Pretti — were killed by federal immigration agents during the unrest. Noem labeled both "domestic terrorists," saying their deaths resulted from impeding law enforcement operations. The details of the specific incidents remain scarce, but the political fallout has been immediate. A Quinnipiac University survey taken January 29 through February 2 found that 58% of respondents believe Noem shouldn't have her job.
The poll number is real. The political calculation behind it is also real — and worth examining. Democrats and media outlets have spent weeks framing the Minneapolis operations as federal overreach. They have held shadow impeachment hearings. They have demanded Noem's resignation. What they have not done is grapple with the underlying question: what is a government supposed to do when a sanctuary city shelters thousands of criminal illegal immigrants and local leaders refuse to cooperate with federal law enforcement?
The answer, apparently, is nothing. Enforce the law, and you're an authoritarian. Don't enforce the law and — well, Democrats never seem to face that second scenario, because they've built a political framework where non-enforcement is the default and any deviation from it is a scandal.
President Trump has repeatedly backed Noem in public — in January and again at the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, where he addressed calls for her removal directly. A reporter asked whether he intended to relieve her of her position.
"Why would I do that? We have the strongest border in the history of our country."
He followed that with a claim about crime statistics:
"We have the best crime numbers we've ever had going back to the year 1900. That's 125 years. We have the lowest crime numbers."
Trump also placed border czar Tom Homan — a man who served as ICE director during Trump's first term and ran Enforcement and Removal Operations under Obama — in command of the Minneapolis situation. Noem credited Homan with bringing local Minneapolis leaders to the negotiating table.
Some unnamed reports have tried to manufacture a rivalry narrative between Homan and Noem. Nothing in the public record supports it. Both are executing a shared mandate, and the president has shown no hesitation in deploying them in complementary roles.
The partial government shutdown consumed Washington's attention during Noem's trip. Congress reached a House agreement to fund DHS through February 13 — a temporary patch, not a solution. Noem used the moment to remind Americans that ICE is only one piece of a sprawling department.
"Only 11% of the DHS budget is ICE. The rest of it is FEMA, TSA, that runs our security checkpoints at our airports."
"It is also the Coast Guard, which is absolutely critical to our maritime protection and also partnering with the Department of War."
She ticked through the rest — weapons of mass destruction programs, science and technology, national labs, cybersecurity — making the point that holding DHS funding hostage over disagreements about immigration enforcement puts far more at risk than ICE operations. ICE is one of 23 agencies under her authority. Shutting down the department to protest deportations means grounding Coast Guard operations, degrading airport security, and delaying disaster relief.
"We have a lot of responsibilities that we absolutely need to fund in order to do them properly. So, I'm hopeful that Congress will recognize that and pass this bill quickly."
It's a revealing dynamic. Democrats who claim to care about government services are willing to defund all of them to stop the one they don't like.
Between the policy fights and the political firestorms, one detail from Noem's trip stands out: she hosted and personally served a barbecue dinner for Border Patrol agents in Arizona, and a separate dinner inside a Tucson hotel for CBP officers. These aren't photo ops that generate viral clips. They're the kind of unglamorous leadership gestures that matter to the people doing dangerous, thankless work along the border — work made harder by a political class that alternately ignores them and vilifies them.
An unnamed GOP insider told Fox News Digital that Noem's time as governor of South Dakota didn't prepare her for one of the most challenging roles in the presidential cabinet. Maybe. Or maybe the critics are measuring preparation by Washington standards, which tend to reward people who manage crises with press releases rather than plane tickets.
Noem's approach this week was simple: show up where the problems are, meet the people doing the work, and make your case to the camera with a border wall behind you instead of a podium. It's not subtle. It doesn't need to be.
Noem is scheduled to testify before a House committee next month. House Democrats will treat it as a prosecution. The impeachment shadow hearings signal where they intend to take this. The 58% disapproval number from Quinnipiac will be cited endlessly.
But here is what the disapproval crowd has to answer for: the border under Biden was an open wound. Thousands of people died in the crossing. Cartels ran human trafficking operations with near impunity. Communities across America absorbed the consequences of a federal government that refused to enforce its own laws. Noem and Homan inherited that wreckage and have overseen the removal of over 3 million people from the country in a matter of months.
As Noem put it, standing along the wall:
"What people need to remember is that Democrat policies were destroying our country. And President Trump came in and said, 'I'm going to protect the American people. It's not going to happen anymore.'"
"Since [the Biden administration], thousands of people's lives have been saved just here, just right here on the border, because those migrants are not victimized anymore."
That's the argument the left cannot afford to engage honestly. So they poll-test disapproval numbers and hold shadow hearings instead.
The border wall behind Noem in Nogales isn't just a physical barrier. It's the line between a country that enforces its laws and one that pretends they don't exist. For now, the woman standing in front of it shows no interest in stepping aside.
