Kristi Noem should have been fired a long time ago.

For more than a year, Noem presided over some of the most outrageous law enforcement actions in modern American history. She deployed thousands of masked agents on immigration raids in American cities, claiming they targeted the “worst of the worst” – but tens of thousands of people with no criminal record, including American citizens, were swept up. Noem kept her job.

She ordered illegal arrests without warrants and deportations without due process. She separated parents from children. She sent detainees to mass incarceration camps like “Alligator Alcatraz” in the Everglades and to El Salvador’s notorious maximum security CECOT prison, where she posed for a photo-op, garishly made up and coiffed, in front of dozens of prisoners crammed into a single cell. She kept her job.

Noem sent camouflaged men carrying battlefield weapons into American neighborhoods, where they beat people on the streets, fired rubber bullets at protestors, and threw gas grenades into crowds. In Minneapolis, they shot and killed two American citizens, Alex Pretti and Renée Good. Noem went on TV to falsely claim that the victims were “domestic terrorists,” then refused to investigate the killings. She kept her job.

Noem spent over $200 million in taxpayer money, more than the budget of some Hollywood blockbusters, on a vanity ad campaign starring, of course, Kristi Noem. She was shown on horseback wearing a Stetson and chaps in front of Mount Rushmore – while threatening to deport immigrants. She kept her job.

Then, under harsh questioning at a Congressional hearing, Noem let slip that the President had known about the wasteful $200 million ad campaign. That was the bridge too far.

For over a year, the arrangement worked perfectly. Donald Trump had no objection to Noem using brutal or illegal methods to carry out his immigration policies, as long as his fingerprints weren’t on them. But the moment she implicated him in the $200 million ad scandal, she was finished.

In the end, Noem wasn’t fired for what she did – but for telling the truth.

HARRY GURAL

Lewisburg

Submitted by Virtual Newsroom