Donald Trump has picked the South Dakota governor, Kristi Noem, to serve as the next secretary of the homeland security department, US media reported on Tuesday, in a further sign of his determination to launch a no-holds-barred crackdown on immigration.
Noem’s pending nomination was reported by CNN and NBC, which said it had confirmed it with four sources.
She is the third anti-immigration hardliner in two days to be chosen to be part of the president-elect’s administration after he clinched a return to the White House in the 5 November election.
Tom Holman, a former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has been selected to fill the role of border czar. And Stephen Miller, an adviser and speech writer in Trump’s first presidency, is expected to become deputy chief of staff, responsible for policy.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is responsible for everything from border protection and immigration to disaster response and the US Secret Service.
Noem’s selection is an apparent reward for being one of the most vocal communicators of Trump’s immigration policy during the election campaign, often voicing uncompromising rhetoric that echoed his.
It is also a statement of confidence in her being stern enough to help oversee Trump’s planned mass deportation of 11 million undocumented immigrants, a priority he has vowed to address as soon as he takes office.
Last January, in a speech to a joint sitting of South Dakota’s legislature that she requested following a visit to the southern border, she said the US was “in a time of invasion”.
“The invasion is coming over our southern border,” she said. “The 50 states have a common enemy, and that enemy is the Mexican drug cartels. They are waging war against our nation, and these cartels are perpetuating violence in each of our states, even right here in South Dakota.”
She offered to send razor wire and agents to help shore up the border.
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Her posture ingratiated her with Trump even while he removed her from the running as a possible vice-presidential candidate after an outcry over her admission in a book she published last May that she once shot a pet dog, as well as a family goat.
In the book, titled No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward, Noem recounted shooting the dog, Cricket, after it attacked chickens belonging to a family she stopped to talk to.
She wrote that she included the story to show that she was prepared to do anything “difficult, messy and ugly”, in politics and in life, if necessary. She said she “hated” the dog.
Yet the tale provoked an angry backlash that seemed to have damaged Noem’s political prospects but for Trump’s victory.
She also aroused the anger of Indigenous tribes in her own state after suggesting that tribal leaders benefited from Latin American drug cartels. She was banned from seven of nine tribal reservations – amounting to one-fifth of South Dakota’s territory – over the remarks.
But while her vice-presidential hopes took a nose dive, Trump apparently kept faith with Noem, who occasionally accompanied him on the campaign trail.
She shared the stage with him and acted as a moderator in October at one of his most unusual campaign events, a town hall meeting in Pennsylvania at which he stopped taking questions after two attenders fainted and ordered some of his favourite songs to be played, while he – and Noem – swayed along.
Both Trump’s campaign and Noem’s office did not respond to requests for comments outside regular business hours.
Reuters contributed reporting
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
