Homeland Safety Secretary Kristi Noem acknowledged Monday that she was making an attempt to ship a message to migrant gang members and the American folks when she was filmed and photographed inside El Salvador’s infamous mega-prison final week.
“People need to see that image,” Noem mentioned of the putting photos of her surrounded by rows of tattooed inmates standing obediently inside their crammed cells on the Terrorism Confinement Heart (CECOT) in El Salvador.
“They need to see that the United States is going to use every tool that we have to make our communities safer, that that is a consequence of someone who is a terrorist,” the DHS secretary added in an interview with Fox Information “Special Report” host Bret Baier Monday evening.
Noem mentioned the tour was meant to offer “transparency” about how the Trump administration is coping with alleged members of Tren de Aragua (TdA) and MS-13 detained within the US.
President Trump has declared each gangs to be Overseas Terrorist Organizations.
“The only people allowed in that prison are terrorists,” she defined. “And to tour that and to look at that, was giving the American people the transparency that they want out of their government.”
“They were able to see exactly where we sending these people who have murdered and raped Americans, that have decimated communities, and there’s going to be consequences for individuals who continue to do that.”
In stark distinction to the shirtless inmates in fundamental white pants or shorts, Noem wore a gold Rolex watch to the grim facility.
The timepiece, recognized as a Rolex Cosmograph Daytona in a viral publish on X, retails for practically $60,000.
The previous Republican governor of South Dakota mentioned that in her go to to the Central American nation, she requested El Salvador President Nayib Bukele if he could be keen to “take more of these terrorists?”
“And he said, ‘Absolutely, we will. We will take the worst of the worst and make sure that they’re facing consequences for what they’ve done to your country’,” Noem mentioned of Bukele’s response.
The Trump administration reached a take care of Bukele final month by which he agreed to accommodate deported migrants affiliated with TdA — a Venezuelan jail gang that took up roots within the US throughout the Biden administration — and MS-13 in CECOT final month.
Some 250 suspected gang members have been shipped to the hellish jail because the Trump administration made the deal.
Earlier this month, a federal decide blocked the Trump administration from utilizing the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to swiftly deport alleged migrant gang members to El Salvador, the place they’d be detained at CECOT.
Noem additionally took Baier on a tour of DHS’s Nationwide Command Heart, which tracks exercise on the southern border and coordinates federal, state and native regulation enforcement responses to pure disasters and different catastrophic occasions, resembling mass shootings.
“If an incident happens in this country, it comes through this center and sends a notification out to all the agencies that would respond,” the DHS secretary defined, displaying off her company’s state-of-the-art operations hub, which is crammed with an array of huge screens displaying stay video, knowledge feeds and detailed maps.
“This feels normal,” Noem mentioned of being DHS secretary and spending time within the command middle. “When I was governor of South Dakota, I had 12 different FEMA-related natural disasters in my state.”
“And so we had an emergency operation center that we utilized quite often. This operates like that, and what it does is it puts everybody in the room solving a problem, on how to best, best address a crisis.”
