Everyone is amply aware that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is a morally vacant scourge, a person with seemingly no limits on the cruelty and lies she’s willing to perpetrate. But Noem isn’t just the heavily contoured face of a murderous mass deportation scheme, nosiree. She’s also a nightmare boss, grifting every last dime and exacting every petty revenge possible.
Building on last week’s bombshell Wall Street Journal report that Noem’s alleged lover fired a Coast Guard pilot for not turning a plane around to grab her heated blankie, which is an absolutely unhinged thing to do, and that she and said paramour, Corey Lewandowski, are using an incredibly expensive luxury jet as a combination love nest/fascist attack transport mode, NBC News has a “but wait, there’s more!” story. It turns out that Noem’s relentless abuse of Coast Guard resources and personnel is making the military branch’s senior officials unhappy, as it should.
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President Donald Trump’s mass deportation goals are stretching the Coast Guard’s aircraft resources to a breaking point. In the past year, deportation flights handled by the Coast Guard increased tenfold. Noem has also fully hijacked the Coast Guard to make deportation its first priority, knocking other duties like search and rescue efforts down to a lower priority.
What does that look like in practice? Perhaps the worst part of the NBC News story is learning that after a Coast Guardsman went overboard last year, the Coast Guard surged search and rescue efforts to find the man. Noem, though, had other ideas.
One of the planes, a C-130 being used in the search over the Pacific, had been scheduled to fly detainees from California to Texas. You’d think that would be a lower priority than finding a member of the military lost at sea—particularly because deportation flights can happen any time, but someone struggling not to die in the ocean requires immediate urgency.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem pilots a U.S. Coast Guard Response Boat Small with the Maritime Security Response Team on March 16, 2025, in San Diego.
Nonetheless, Noem yanked the plane from search and rescue efforts to complete the deportation flight instead. This caused the regional Coast Guard command to rush to find other available aircraft to fulfill deportation duties so that the C-130 could keep helping with the search.
This is appalling behavior, but there won’t be any consequences for it. Rather, Noem knows that she’s pretty much locked into her Cabinet gig as long as she’s willing to be as vicious and unprincipled as Trump wants her to be.
So no one is going to call her out over the fact that over 750 Coast Guard flights have now been diverted from traditional Coast Guard activities like maritime patrols and search and rescue missions, and instead used to fly terrified immigrants to undisclosed locations.
Coast Guard personnel aren’t the only ones who have been pulled off their actual jobs to do ICE’s work instead. That means less focus on terrorism, drug trafficking, and crime, but sure, Noem and Trump are keeping us safe from the terror of 5-year-olds, surely the worst of the worst.
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Besides wrecking the core work of the Coast Guard, Noem is also grifting off the agency in impressive ways, like living rent-free in the Coast Guard commandant’s home. Sure, other cabinet members have lived in military housing, but they have actually paid for it.
According to Noem, she had to move because of death threats, but it looks a lot more like she moved because the Daily Mail snapped pix of Lewandowski slipping out of his own apartment and into Noem’s across the street.
Also, the Coast Guard paid for Noem’s airborne luxe love shack, along with a second luxury jet that was purchased for god knows what. Confusingly, though, The Wall Street Journal reported that DHS is currently leasing the plane, but is going to drop $70 million on it soon. Didn’t know the government could do a rent-to-own kinda thing, but that seems on-brand for the Trump administration.
Now, Noem isn’t keeping all that money for herself. She’s also showering her buddies with hundreds of millions of dollars for vanity ad campaigns starring herself.
It’s wearying to keep repeating, but imagine if any Cabinet member in former President Joe Biden’s administration had basically forced the military to buy them a jet that they then used to fly around with their married lover, abusing staff and seemingly being totally cool if servicemembers drown. But these days, it’s perfectly normal behavior.
Trump is the biggest, most unethical grifter imaginable, so why shouldn’t his Cabinet members ride those coattails?
