DHS Nominee Noem Boasts About ‘Relationships’ With SD Tribes

At her Friday confirmation hearing as Trump’s pick for DHS secretary, Gov. Kristi Noem made rambling remarks suggesting she has good working relationships with her state’s tribes:

NOEM: I offered to train federal law enforcement officers, BIA officers, but also their tribal police in South Dakota, at no cost to our tribes. And it’s been an incredible, powerful tool that we’ve had to build relationships. Those tribal police had the chance to go through academy with the local – maybe deputies from the counties and the state highway patrol troopers, that were coming on board, and those relationships have built partnerships in our state that we didn’t have before.

It’s true that she set up a program to train tribal law enforcers. But she’s hardly been a good partner with the nine tribes in South Dakota. If anything, she seems to have gone out of her way to antagonize them. From South Dakota Searchlight:

Leaders from all nine tribal nations voted to ban her from their land last year after she suggested some of them are benefiting from the presence of drug cartels in the state, and said Native American children “don’t have any hope” or “parents who show up,” and pushed for tax cut legislation without seeking tribal input on its potential consequences.

One tribe lifted its ban on Friday and the Searchlight reported the others are interested in a “reset.” But that reset seems more about their belief that Noem’s successor, Lt. Gov. Larry Rhoden, seems more reasonable. Standing Rock Chairwoman Janet Alkire described him as seeming open-minded and “wanting to work” with the tribes.

There are lots of reasons Noem has no business being secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, mostly because she is utterly unqualified for the job. She also seems more interested in performative stunts than in protecting South Dakotans. In June, after sending South Dakota’s national guard three times to the U.S.-Mexico Mexico border, about a thousand miles away, she said it was too expensive to send them to flood-ravaged areas in her own state. Also, she seems to have quite a problem with the truth. That’s not counting her stomach-turning story about killing her puppy.

The fact that a good chunk of her own constituents have barred her from setting foot on their land, while she pretends she’s their pal, is pretty bad, too.