Immigration

Fiona Harrigan | 11.14.2024 2:40 PM

Just over a week after winning the presidential election, Donald Trump has begun to assemble a team that leaves no doubt he intends to implement a punitive immigration platform come 2025.

Trump has announced that South Dakota Republican Gov. Kristi Noem will serve as secretary of Homeland Security, former Acting Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Thomas Homan will serve as "border czar," and former immigration adviser Stephen Miller will serve as deputy chief of staff for policy. Homan and Miller are both known hard-liners who served in much-publicized roles during the first Trump administration, and Noem has emerged as an active-on-the-border governor. All three picks are a sign that Trump will again lean into—and hire people willing to realize—his worst impulses on immigration policy.

Noem, who served for eight years in the House of Representatives before becoming governor of South Dakota in 2019, has scant immigration policy experience at the federal level. After Trump suspended refugee resettlement and barred the entry of people from seven Muslim-majority countries for several months in 2017, she praised the move, saying she supported a "temporary pause on accepting refugees from terrorist-held areas."

Noem has been far more active in border policy........

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