We all just got duped again.
Everyone is out here celebrating Kristi Noem getting fired like they won something. Let me ruin that for you.
She wasn’t fired. She was upgraded.
Trump created a brand new position specifically for her - Special Envoy for the Shield of the Americas - and handed it to her the same day he announced she was “leaving” DHS. No job posting. No competition. A custom title, conjured out of thin air, so the woman who oversaw the killings of two American citizens in Minneapolis could have a bigger sandbox to operate in.
The $220 million ad campaign featuring Kristi Noem on horseback near Mount Rushmore - taxpayer money, contracts awarded to firms with Republican ties, including a subcontractor linked to people close to Noem herself - that’s what finally made her a liability. Not the dead Americans alone. The horse commercial.
Word on the street is that Trump wasn’t happy about that - he didn’t approve it. But - as it turns out - at CPAC in February 2025, Noem told a crowd of Republican donors - in detail, on the record - that Trump personally came up with the ad campaign.
She said he told her he wanted her to do ads for the border, said he didn’t want to be in them himself - “I want you in the ads, and I want your face in the ads” - and then gave her the actual line: “I want you to thank me for closing the border.”
She said “Yes, sir” and did exactly that. In the domestic version of the ad, she literally says “Thank you, President Donald J. Trump, for securing our border.”
Fast forward to last week. She’s under oath in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Senator John Kennedy asks her about the $220 million. She repeats the same story - Trump asked for it, Trump approved it. Trump then calls Kennedy after the hearing. Kennedy describes him as “not a happy cowboy.” Trump tells Reuters he “never knew anything about it.”
Trump is 79. He can barely remember last week.
Anyway.
So now she’s working directly with Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth - two people who have already made clear that domestic law, international law, and the concept of civilian oversight are more suggestions than rules - to run Trump’s policy agenda across Latin America and the Caribbean.
The administration held a kickoff summit for the Shield of the Americas at Doral yesterday, and the invite list tells you everything: twelve handpicked heads of state from 33 countries in the region, all of them aligned with Trump’s agenda, several of them recently elected in countries where Trump openly meddled in the elections.
Brazil, Colombia, Mexico - the U.S.’s largest trading partner - not invited.
The whole thing is structured as a coalition of whoever already agrees with you, which is not a coalition, it’s a press release.
The official mission is stopping cartels and illegal immigration. The actual mission, which the administration has not been particularly subtle about, is resource control. Venezuela’s oil. Panama’s canal. The region’s critical minerals. Noem spent her year at DHS riding along on immigration raids for the cameras, calling dead American protesters terrorists, and burning through public funds on self-promotional advertising. That skillset is now being deployed internationally, with fewer accountability mechanisms and more diplomatic cover.
The people celebrating her departure from DHS are looking at the wrong thing. The question isn’t whether Kristi Noem is at DHS. The question is what she’s doing next and who’s watching.
The answer to the second part is: not many people, and that’s the point.
This newly made-up role comes with a lot less oversight. She at least had to be confirmed as Secretary of Homeland Security - and did have to answer to Congress, which ultimately led to her being fired. Who does she answer to now - other than Trump?
If you want to actually do something: contact your senators and push for confirmation hearings on her new role - because an envoy position created by executive fiat with no Senate confirmation is exactly the kind of unchecked appointment that should have oversight attached to it.
The truth is - Noem didn’t get fired. She got promoted to a job with less scrutiny, more power, and a whole hemisphere to work with.
Duped again.
Sources
- NBC News: Trump fires Kristi Noem as homeland security secretary
- Al Jazeera: Why did Trump remove Kristi Noem as DHS secretary; who is Markwayne Mullin?
- Axios: DHS Secretary Kristi Noem out, Trump says
- CNN: Trump fires Noem as frustrations build among White House officials, GOP lawmakers
- The Antagonist Magazine: Kristi Noem Wasn’t Fired; She Was Promoted
- Wikipedia: Killing of Renee Good
- Wikipedia: Killing of Alex Pretti
- CBS News: House Oversight Democrats’ report on Renee Good and Alex Pretti killings in Minneapolis
- Jezebel: Minnesota ICE investigations and prosecution
Correction, September 28th, 2026: This essay first said Noem told the CPAC crowd that Trump loved her South Dakota tourism ads and at first wanted to be in the border ads himself - Rolling Stone’s report of that speech has her saying he didn’t want to be in them and wanted her face in them instead. And it said the domestic version of the ad ends with her thanking Trump - she thanks him for securing the border, and the ad keeps going from there.
Update, September 28th, 2026: A couple of lines now say more exactly what the record shows - an administration official listed the fallout in Minnesota among the reasons she was fired, and the new envoy job comes with less oversight rather than none - and one source link’s label now matches the story.