Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem shared a bizarre story Tuesday of a migrant who “started to eat himself” in defense of President Donald Trump’s mass deportations while visiting Florida’s new “Alligator Alcatraz” migrant facility.
“The other day I was talking to some marshals that had been partnering with (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), they said that they had detained a cannibal and put him on a plane to take him home, and while they had him in his seat, he started to eat himself, and they had to get him off and get him medical attention,” Noem said, sitting besides Trump during a press conference.
“These are the kinds of deranged individuals that are on our streets in America that we're trying to target and get out of our country because they are so deranged, they don't belong here. They shouldn't be walking the streets with our children, and they shouldn't be living in the communities with our families.”
Under the guise of the Alien Enemies Act, the Trump administration has pursued a mass deportation policy targeting undocumented immigrants across the board, whether they’ve been convicted of a crime or not. Arrests of migrants with no criminal history has increased by 807% since Trump took office, with 65% of all migrants arrested by ICE having no convictions, per internal ICE data.
Trump – and, by extension, Noem, who heads ICE as DHS secretary – have repeatedly pushed back on media reports about the deportation of migrants without criminal histories. Noem specifically called out some of those reporting media outlets during the press conference, as well as other critics of Trump’s deportation policies.
“A bunch of liberals, socialists and Marxists are out there lying about what President Trump is doing; President Trump is upholding freedom by what he is doing, the freedom to live safely in this country and to do things legally and to have justice,” she said.
“Because those liberals, and I'm calling out you CNN, I'm calling you out because you lie every single day about what these operations are. We are going after murderers, rapists, traffickers and drug dealers, getting them off the streets and getting them out of this country because Joe Biden let the worst of the worst come in here.”
