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One of the problems of being competent is that people take your achievements for granted.
Pretty soon they forget all about them and concoct new complaints or demands.
This is the case with President Trump’s astonishingly successful fulfilled promise on border security, achieved within the first 100 days of his second term by his most underestimated Cabinet secretary, Kristi Noem, the tough-minded Homeland Security chief pilloried by the left as “ICE Barbie” because they can’t find anything real to criticize.
Thanks to Noem and “border czar” Tom Homan, as well as the president’s own Day One executive orders, Trump could truthfully declare at the end of April that the southern border was “closed,” with a 95% plunge in daily encounters and not a single alien released into the country.
But then came the hard part of unwinding Joe Biden’s toxic legacy: deportations.
This week, I observed Noem in action when she joined more than 100 heavily armed Border Patrol and ICE agents in armored vehicles with helicopter and drone support to execute a felony arrest warrant on a criminal illegal alien.
The predawn raid in the peaceful Chicago suburb of Elgin netted a total of five illegals from Mexico and Venezuela, with DHS alleging it had found convictions and arrests against three of the men for assault, felony stalking and aggravated DUI.
Previously deported
The operation targeted just one person, Carlos Gonzalez-Leon, who was previously deported to Mexico but returned under Biden and has been convicted for assault causing bodily harm on a family member.
Several days of surveillance of the rented house where he was living showed several other men coming and going and established a pattern of daily behavior for the household.
On Tuesday, Noem met with the large team of armed operators at a DHS facility just after 4 a.m., as they ran through the plan of action including contingencies for “shots fired,” “officer down,” “hostage rescue” and medic support.
It would be an overwhelming show of force, and they were leaving nothing to chance.
But there was a problem.
At 5 a.m., when the high-risk raid was scheduled, they weren’t certain Gonzalez-Leon, who slept in the basement, was actually in the house; “bedded down” in operator-speak.
They knew that one of the residents left for work just after 5 a.m. so Tuesday morning they watched the man leave and then executed a routine traffic stop a few blocks away so he could confirm his roommate was indeed asleep in bed.
At 5:38 a.m., Noem and the motorcade of a dozen trucks parked quietly nearby began moving, along with two BearCats (heavily armored tactical vehicles) containing armed Border Patrol officers in camouflage gear with helmets and night-vision goggles.
Six minutes later, sleepy Chippewa Drive didn’t know what hit it.
In rapid succession, the lead BearCat drove up Gonzalez-Leon’s driveway and three operators clinging to the back jumped off and ran toward the front porch, as dozens of their colleagues surrounded the house.
Bright white floodlights lit up the front door.
Searchlights from a helicopter bathed the rooftop.
Green laser beams from multiple firearms shone through windows, giving the operators an idea of where the residents were in the house.
At least one person was moving about the kitchen.
The air was crisp, and a bright crescent moon hung low in the sky.
Under the whop-whop sound of the circling helicopter, a dog was yelping.
Then an officer began barking instructions through a megaphone in English and Spanish: “Gonzalez-Leon, come to the front door with your hands up. We have a warrant.”
Seventy seconds later the message changed: “Police. Step away from the door. Step away from the door.”
Suspects in custody
Thirty seconds later, there was an almighty bang, and a red and yellow flash illuminated the front porch to show a paned-glass wooden front door being blown off its hinges.
It fell backward into the front hallway, but a white screen door that had been in front of it remained intact.
It was through that door that, one by one, five men emerged with their hands in the air.
By 6 a.m., 16 minutes after the first assault, it was all over. Suspect arrested. Four bonus illegal aliens apprehended. Job well done.
Noem, her critics might be surprised to hear, stopped to pat a little caramel colored terrier with a fluffy tail that was running around the driveway yapping at officers as they prepared to leave.
The sun was rising when they got back to the DHS parking lot 10 minutes later.
Noem, dressed in what is now her trademark attire of long ponytail, khaki CBP baseball cap, bootleg jeans, black DHS jacket and body armor, walked among the uniformed men congratulating them as they piled out of their trucks.
They seemed to appreciate it, asking for autographs and expressing relief that they now had a DHS secretary who “has our back.”
It was a positive result and went off without a hitch, but the massive resources needed to surveil and apprehend just one of the estimated 20-25 million illegals who arrived here under Joe Biden brings home the degree of difficulty involved in deporting even the meaningful fraction of hardcore criminals at the top of the list.
Noem is proud of having deported more than 400,000 illegal criminal aliens so far.
An additional 2.2 million have left voluntarily.
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She hopes the rest will see the writing on the wall and follow suit.
She is appearing in ads across the country encouraging illegals to leave and return the “right way” — or face the full brutal force of the federal government.
In her early morning pep talk, she told the men that she had met the president the night before and he had asked her to convey his support and tell them how much the families and communities they were going into appreciated their work, even if Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, the entire Democrat Party and the courts are doing everything they can to obstruct them.
She is acutely aware her troops are under attack.
They have been doxxed and labeled fascist.
Organized militants posing as protesters throw rocks at their vehicles and slash their tires.
Last week, an ICE officer was seriously injured when he was dragged down the road by a car driven by a criminal illegal alien resisting arrest.
In January, a Border Patrol agent was ambushed and slaughtered by members of a vegan transgender cult on a murderous rampage across the country.
“I’m here to learn from all of you,” she told them.
“You’re all great Americans. I appreciate you and your willingness to move across the country to go to a city like Chicago. You are the best of the best.” . . .
“Be safe and be smart.”
Afterward, she told me in an interview for Pod Force One that the responsibility for the safety of the operations weighs heavily on her.
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“I look around those rooms and I think they’ve got kiddos at home . . . I’m going to do my very best as secretary to make sure they go home at night.”
She revealed that Trump was surprised when she asked for the Homeland Security portfolio.
“Why would you be interested in that?” he asked.
Tough enough
She replied: “Sir, because you’re going to have to have somebody who’s tough enough to do it. It’s going to be hard . . . to go after these criminals that are endangering our country and our people and remove them. And it’s going to take a while and you’re going to have to have somebody who’s tough enough to actually do it.”
Trump was already impressed by her governance of the state of South Dakota, and her resolve during the COVID pandemic to keep the state open.
But he has also privately expressed a sort of rueful marvel at the famous story about how she shot her dog.
The former rancher did it because the dog was killing animals for fun and she decided it was a danger to humans, but when she included the story in her autobiography, it upset countless dog lovers.
It might have knocked her off his VP list, but that story helped Trump decide she has what it takes.
She is also a mother and a grandmother, which gives her the ability to convey the compassionate reasons for deportations.
She told Trump: “You’ll need somebody who can . . . visit with the American people about why we’re doing what we’re doing and will go out and tell the stories of all the victims and . . . how it’s endangering our national security. And I said, I will do that for you.”
We’re lucky Noem is in the job.
She has the right combination of hard-nosed prairie-rancher practicality, with principled compassion for the American people.
But despite her optimism and resolve, given the challenges of each deportation, it seems unlikely that Biden’s toxic border legacy can be completely reversed in four years.
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