Donald Trump is tapping South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem to head the Department of Homeland Security, CNN said, selecting a loyalist once seen as a potential vice presidential candidate for a job that includes securing the US border and carrying out a promised mass deportation.
Noem would join Tom Homan, Trump’s pick for White House “border czar,” and Stephen Miller, an immigration hardliner, in the administration after the president-elect takes office Jan. 20, CNN said, citing two people familiar with the decision who it didn’t identify. Unlike Homan and Miller, however, Noem’s position requires Senate confirmation.
Created following the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, the department holds diverse responsibilities, including cybersecurity, investigating domestic terrorism threats, responding to natural disasters and enforcing customs laws. DHS also manages the Secret Service, which came under scrutiny this year after it failed to prevent a July shooting that nearly took Trump’s life and led to the resignation of the agency’s director.
Front and center for the 52-year-old Noem, however, will be implementing Trump’s policies on immigration, including his pledge to carry out mass deportations of undocumented migrants, one of the key elements of the incoming president’s second term agenda.
Any effort to remove millions of migrants from the US faces multiple hurdles, including the basic logistics involving Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s ability to locate and remove those people, legal challenges, funding questions as well as the willingness of other countries — primarily Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras — to accept people being sent back.
Some countries, like China, Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua, haven’t always agreed to receive deportation flights.
In his first term, Trump made progress on but struggled to ultimately deliver on his promises of large-scale removals or completing a wall across the US-Mexico border. In his first term, deportations never surpassed 360,000 a year, below the levels seen under former President Barack Obama.
Trump’s deportation plans are likely to start by targeting the more than 1 million people in the US who have no legal basis to stay in the country, either because they have committed crimes or exhausted their appeals.