Kristi Noem

• 1. Introduction

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  Kristi Lynn Arnold Noem was born on the 30th of November 1971, in Watertown, South Dakota, the daughter of Corinne and Ron Arnold. She grew up on a ranch and farm near the small town of Hazel, alongside her siblings, with Norwegian ancestry and a family tree that traces back to Ephraim Wilson, a soldier in the American Revolutionary War. At eighteen, she was crowned South Dakota Snow Queen. By her early fifties, she had served as a state legislator, a four-term U.S. representative, governor of South Dakota, and secretary of homeland security. Her arc from ranch hand to Cabinet member is a story of striking ambition, but also of controversies that kept pace with every rise. What drove her through the state house, through Congress, through the governor's office, and finally into one of the most powerful law enforcement positions in the United States? And what brought her tenure at the Department of Homeland Security to an end in less than fourteen months?

• 2. Ranch, Loss, and Reinvention

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  In March 1994, Ron Arnold, Kristi's father, died in a grain bin accident. Noem was a student at Northern State University at the time, and she left college to return to the family ranch. Weeks after her father's death, on the 21st of April 1994, her daughter Kassidy was born. She added a hunting lodge and a restaurant to the family property, and her siblings moved back to help expand those businesses.

  Noem took classes at the Watertown campus of Mount Marty College, at South Dakota State University, and through online courses at the University of South Dakota. She finally earned a Bachelor of Arts in political science from South Dakota State University in 2012, while already serving as a member of Congress. The Washington Post described her as Capitol Hill's "most powerful intern" for receiving college intern credits from her position as an elected representative.

  The picture that emerges from those years is one of grinding improvisation. The family tragedy that interrupted her education also handed her an institution to run at age twenty-two. She would spend nearly two decades completing the degree she had set aside, even as she climbed through elected office. That combination of tenacity and personal loss would become a recurring feature of how she presented herself to voters.

• 3. From the State House to Congress

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  In 2006, Noem won a seat in the South Dakota House of Representatives representing the 6th district, which spans parts of Beadle, Clark, Codington, Hamlin, and Kingsbury counties. She won that first race with 39 percent of the vote and direct campaign contributions of $6,330. Two years later, she was reelected with 41 percent.

  During her four years in the state house, she served as assistant majority leader in her second term and was the prime sponsor of eleven bills that became law, including property tax reforms and two measures expanding gun rights in South Dakota. She also joined the Civil Air Patrol as a state legislative member, a connection she maintained into her later career.

  In 2010, she ran for South Dakota's at-large seat in the U.S. House of Representatives and defeated the incumbent Democrat Stephanie Herseth Sandlin in the general election. She was reelected three times, serving until 2019. Almost immediately upon arriving in Washington, she was chosen by the 87-member Republican freshman class as liaison to the House leadership, making her the second woman to serve in that capacity. In the first quarter of 2011, she raised $169,000 from political action committees, ranking among the top fundraisers in the freshman class. On the 8th of March 2011, she announced the formation of her own leadership political action committee, KRISTI PAC, with former South Dakota Lieutenant Governor Steve Kirby as its treasurer.

• 4. Policy Positions in Office

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  Noem co-sponsored legislation that would have federally banned abortion, including a 2015 bill to amend the 14th Amendment to define human life and personhood as beginning at fertilization. She supported the Keystone XL Pipeline and co-sponsored measures to end the 2010 deepwater drilling moratorium in the Gulf of Mexico. She denied the scientific consensus on climate change, saying in 2022 that she believed "the science has been varied on it, and it hasn't been proven to me that what we're doing is affecting the climate."

  On taxes, she served on the conference committee that negotiated the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which she said gave the average South Dakota family a $1,200 tax cut. She opposed the Affordable Care Act and supported cuts to Medicaid funding proposed by Republican Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan. A study found those proposed cuts would reduce Medicaid benefits for South Dakota recipients by 55 percent.

  Noem supported President Trump's 2017 executive order that suspended the U.S. refugee program for 120 days and banned travel from seven Muslim-majority countries for 90 days. She said she supported a temporary ban on accepting refugees from "terrorist-held" areas but did not address the parts of the order that led to the detention of legal residents and green-card holders.

• 5. Governor of South Dakota

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  Noem was sworn in as South Dakota's 33rd governor on the 5th of January 2019, becoming the first woman to hold that office. She had defeated South Dakota Attorney General Marty Jackley in the Republican primary, 56 to 44 percent, and Democratic nominee Billie Sutton in the general election, 51 to 48 percent. In 2022, she ran for reelection and defeated Democrat Jamie Smith, 62 to 35 percent, flipping 17 counties that had previously voted Democratic and setting a record for the most votes received by a candidate for governor in South Dakota.

  During the COVID-19 pandemic, Noem did not maintain statewide stay-at-home orders or mask mandates. On the 13th of March 2020, she ordered K-12 schools to close, and on April 6 she extended that order through the rest of the school year. She opposed businesses from requiring proof of vaccination and signed a bill in February 2021 limiting civil liability for certain COVID-19 exposures. In early 2020, the Smithfield Foods plant in Sioux Falls reported four deaths and nearly 1,300 infections among workers and family members. Noem said she believed that "99 percent of what's going on today wasn't happening inside" the plant. By the 22nd of October 2020, South Dakota hospitalizations reached a then-record 355, with 75 patients in intensive care units.

  Noem's anti-protest legislation, developed in collaboration with the energy company TransCanada Corporation in response to protests against the Keystone Pipeline, created a fund to cover policing costs for pipeline protests and established civil penalties for encouraging participation in rioting. The Pine Ridge Indian Reservation banned Noem from its grounds in response. The legislation was later challenged by the Indigenous Environmental Network, the Sierra Club, and others, and a federal court struck down portions of it as unconstitutional.

  In 2020, after Noem's daughter Kassidy Peters was denied a real estate appraisal license, Noem summoned the state employee who had directed South Dakota's Appraiser Certification Program for thirty years, Sherry Bren, to a meeting at the governor's mansion. Bren later testified that she felt "very nervous" and "intimidated" at the meeting. A week after the meeting, the state Labor Secretary demanded Bren's resignation. Bren ultimately filed an age discrimination complaint and received a $200,000 settlement with a nondisclosure agreement to withdraw the complaint and leave her position.

• 6. Relations with Native American Tribes

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  By 2024, all nine tribes of South Dakota had banned Noem from entering tribal lands, prohibiting her from nearly 20 percent of the state. The Oglala Sioux acted first in February, followed by the Cheyenne River Sioux, the Standing Rock Sioux, and the Rosebud Sioux in April, and then the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, the Crow Creek Sioux, and the Flandreau Santee Sioux in May.

  The bans followed Noem's January 2024 statements that "an invasion is coming over the southern border" and that Mexican drug cartels were "using our reservations to facilitate the spread of drugs throughout the Midwest." In March 2024, she said there were "some tribal leaders that I believe are personally benefiting from the cartels being there", without providing evidence. She added that people who "actually live in those situations" contacted her daily, and described conditions of 80 to 90 percent unemployment on the reservations.

  Around January 2025, Noem apologized to the tribes for the misunderstanding between them. The Flandreau Santee Sioux dissolved its ban and expressed support for her nomination as Secretary of Homeland Security, saying "the Governor has shown us that she is committed to protecting the people of South Dakota including the citizens of the nine Tribal Nations." The other eight bans remained in effect at the time of her nomination.

• 7. No Going Back and the Cricket Controversy

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  In April 2024, pre-release excerpts from Noem's second autobiography, No Going Back, ignited a prolonged political firestorm. In a chapter titled "Bad Day to Be a Goat", Noem recounted bringing her family's fourteen-month-old female wirehaired pointer, Cricket, on a pheasant hunt at her family's hunting lodge. She wrote that Cricket ruined the hunt and later killed several chickens. Noem decided Cricket was "dangerous" and "untrainable" and shot the dog dead in a gravel pit. She then killed a male goat she described as "disgusting, musky, rancid".

  The revelation drew bipartisan criticism and significantly undermined Noem's position as a potential vice-presidential running mate for Trump. A fundraising dinner scheduled for May 4 in Colorado was canceled after the organizing group and the hotel received death threats. Noem initially responded that "tough decisions like this happen all the time on a farm", later saying the incident occurred twenty years before and that the media had "put the worst spin" on the story.

  The book also contained claims that a fact-check quickly disputed. Noem wrote that she had met North Korean leader Kim Jong Un; her spokesperson later said the claim was an error and would be removed from future editions. She also wrote that she had canceled a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron over a comment he made to the press. The French government responded that it had neither invited Noem nor had any record of a scheduled meeting.

  The Washington Post's literary critic Ron Charles wrote that Noem's account of Cricket's death was "the one time in this howlingly dull book that Noem demonstrates any sense of setting, character, plot and emotional honesty."

• 8. Secretary of Homeland Security

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  Trump nominated Noem as his Secretary of Homeland Security on the 12th of November 2024. The Senate confirmed her on the 25th of January 2025, by a vote of 59 to 34, with seven Democrats voting in favor. She was sworn in the same day by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, with Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry holding the Bible.

  In the early morning of January 28, she joined federal law enforcement agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to lead a raid on undocumented immigrants in New York City. One of her first acts was to rescind an eighteen-month extension of temporary protected status for about 600,000 Venezuelans. In March, she revoked legal protections for 532,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela who had settled in the U.S. since 2022.

  In April 2025, The Washington Post reported that Noem and an acting Social Security Administration official had instructed the agency to falsely list over 6,000 living immigrants in its database of dead people. During a May 2025 Senate hearing, Noem incorrectly defined habeas corpus as "a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country", a definition that was incorrect; habeas corpus is the constitutional right for a detainee to ask a court to review the legality of their detention.

  During a December 2025 committee hearing, Representative Seth Magaziner asked Noem whether DHS had deported any U.S. veterans. She said no. He then showed, via video call, Purple Heart recipient Sae Joon Park, a green-card holder who had been deported under her administration. Park had immigrated legally from South Korea at age 7, enlisted in the U.S. Army after graduating from Notre Dame High School in Sherman Oaks in 1988, and was deployed to Panama in 1989 during Operation Just Cause, where he was wounded by enemy gunfire.

  In March 2026, a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing focused on Noem's handling of the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents, her relationship with political operative Corey Lewandowski, more than $220 million in government funds spent on television advertisements, and more than $300 million allocated for three private luxury jets. One of the aircraft was a Boeing 737 MAX 8 with a bedroom and 18 seats. On March 5, Trump announced he had reassigned Noem to a new position as Special Envoy for The Shield of the Americas, making her the first Cabinet official to leave her post during Trump's second term. Oklahoma senator Markwayne Mullin was sworn in as her successor on March 24.