DHS Will ‘Protect This Country,’ Says Secretary Kristi Noem in First Address to Staff

The newly appointed Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem delivered remarks to her staff for the first time Tuesday afternoon.  

“We will exercise all legal authorities that we have to protect this country because it is the only last light of freedom left,” Noem told a packed room of her new colleagues.  

“I am thrilled that President [Donald] Trump trusted me with this job,” Noem said, telling the audience that she asked Trump for the job.  

“I said, ‘I would like to be the secretary of Homeland Security, sir, because it’s your number one priority. And I love my job as governor of South Dakota, I love my home and my family, I would not leave them to spend time away unless I was doing something of significance,’” Noem recalls telling Trump.  

Noem left her position as governor of South Dakota to serve as DHS secretary. Before being elected as the governor of South Dakota in 2018, Noem represented her state in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Despite being an outspoken supporter of Trump, Noem kept her roughly eight-minute speech apolitical, choosing instead to share a bit of her personal background with her new team.  

“I grew up as a farmer and a rancher,” Noem said.  

“I grew up with a dad who was a cowboy, and he was much like you would picture John Wayne was in his Westerns,” she added, going on to share the influence her father and the ranching lifestyle has had on her and her work ethic. At a young age, her father told her and her sibling to “get out of bed because more people die in bed than anywhere else,” Noem recalled.  

When she was about 10, Noem said, she was helping her dad build a fence when her father asked her where the tool was to drive the posts into the ground. She told her father it was in the truck, and he told her to get it. As she returned with the tool and handed it to her father, Noem recalled her father telling her, “You should know what I need before I know what I need.”  

“What he was doing was teaching us to think ahead and to think three steps ahead of what he needed and have it ready and prepared for him so he could be more efficient, he could get more work done and we could do a better job,” Noem said, adding that this is the job of DHS.  

“We prepare ahead and think three steps ahead so that people have what they need before they need it,” she said, adding that she intends to challenge all at DHS to think about how the department can be “more efficient” and “nimble” to meet the challenges at hand.  

“We will be the first line of defense for anybody that’s in the American homeland,” she said. “We will do everything that we can to protect the American people.”  

Noem is taking over following the four-year tenure of Alejandro Mayorkas, who served as DHS secretary in the Biden administration.

Noem delivered her remarks from the DHS offices in Washington, D.C., only hours after accompanying Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents as they made arrests of criminal illegal aliens in New York City Tuesday morning.  

“We are getting the dirtbags off these streets,” Noem said in a video posted on her X page.  

In another X post Tuesday morning, Noem said ICE agents had just arrested a criminal illegal alien with “kidnapping, assault and burglary charges.”  

ICE, like Customs and Border Protection, operates under DHS.  

ICE has arrested more than 4,500 illegal aliens since Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20. According to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, all those arrested are criminals since they all crossed the border illegally. ICE reports that those arrested include MS-13 gang members, illegal immigrants charged with assault, rape, rape of a child, armed robbery, drug related offenses, and other violent crimes.  

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