Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
Season 13 Episode 1
Aired on February 15, 2026
Main segment: Department of Homeland Security, Operation Metro Surge and ensuing protests in Minneapolis
Other segments: _____
John Oliver discusses ICE’s repeated atrocities over the past months and explores the massive entity overseeing it all: the Department of Homeland Security. How it started, who runs it, and all the ways it may be actively making us less safe. Plus, of course, the messiest Olympians at this year’s games and why Andy Cohen should get involved.
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Transcript
Note for Students & Writers: This transcript is archived here for educational purposes, critical analysis, and screenwriting study. All rights belong to the original creators.
♪ ♪
[Cheers and applause]
JOHN: Welcome, welcome, welcome to “Last Week Tonight!” We’re back! We’ve been off for three months, Trump was awarded the first-ever FIFA Peace Prize, just weeks before kidnapping the president of Venezuela.
The latest batch of Epstein—
JOHN: Wait, what? I mean, I guess he’s right. It is actually whole milk, with a W, not hole milk, which I know sounds like nonsense, but is actually the official beverage of the absolutely real new Netflix show “Detective Hole.”
Starring — and this is true — “Detective Harry Hole.”
Apparently, it’s based on a Norwegian series of novels, and is supposed to be pronounced “Hool-ah,” but respectfully, nah, Norway. It’s pronounced hole.
And that was just the beginning.
Zohran Mamdani was sworn in as New York mayor, Eric Adams launched a meme coin that he said would — among other things — the Department of the Interior announced a new coal mascot called “Coalie,” which really felt like an attempt to bait us into coming back early.
It wasn’t the only time we were tempted to do that — because there was also the headline “Beloved walrus penis stolen from New Jersey cheesesteak icon. Owner is blubbering mad.”
You don’t think if we’d been on air back then, we’d have tracked down that walrus penis and donated the proceeds to Doctors Without Borders or something? Are you new here?
Oh, and at Miss Universe, one contestant did this.
Norway! This salmon-inspired gown… Norway’s leading export.
JOHN: Yeah, that happened! Miss Norway wore this as a costume.
And I guess to be fair, it does sum up Norway nicely in an— I mean, what else was she going to dress up as? Detective Harry Hole?
But wait — I’m still not done.
Because the Winter Olympics got underway, and there’s already been lots of incredible action, as well as some personal drama like this.
It was a career defining moment for biathlete Sturla Holm Laegreid, but it’s what he said next that he’ll be remembered for.
Six months ago I met the love of my life. The world’s most beautiful, wonderful person in the world. Three months ago I made the biggest mistake of my life. I cheated on her.
JOHN: Wow, that’s not the usual kind of declaration of love you see in public.
It’s why stadium jumbotrons generally say things like, “Will you marry me?” and not “Sorry I fucked your sister, are we cool?”
The point is, that guy won a bronze medal, then immediately begged for his ex-girlfriend of six months to forgive him, and seemed optimistic and might work.
He told his country and the world that he’d rather commit, quote, social suicide on live TV if it meant a small chance of winning her back.
Today I made the choice to tell the world what I did. Maybe it can help, I don’t know. I hope there is a happy ending.
There’s not, as yet.
JOHN: Oh, there is definitely a statement declining to reunite, and saying, “We have had contact and he is aware of my opinions on this.”
A response that could only be more brutal if she delivered it after winning silver in his event.
And if you’re thinking “Wow, the biathlon is surprisingly messy,” you clearly know nothing about the biathlon.
Because it’s not even this guy’s first time causing trouble.
In 2023 he was banned from the biathlon World Cup after accidentally, and this is true, shooting his gun in the team’s hotel.
Meanwhile, Julia Simon competed for France despite the fact that last October after she admitted to stealing the credit cards of her teammate and an unnamed French staffer, and making $2,300 in online purchases.
She apparently said “I can’t explain it. I don’t remember doing it. I can’t make sense of it.”
And I don’t know how this story could get any juicier, unless she turns out to be the woman that guy cheated on his girlfriend with. Because at that point, someone please call Andy Cohen, we have a hit new Bravo series on our hands.
By the way, Simone competed at the Olympics this week, and guess what? She won fucking gold!
The French credit-card thief won gold!
You think I don’t want to talk about the chaotic energy of Olympic biathletes for the rest of this show? Of course I do! It’s all I want to talk about.
But sadly, I can’t do that, because — and I think you know where this is going — we have to dive straight in with our main story this week, which concerns what’s been happening in Minnesota, from the surge in immigration raids, to the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, to the massive protests in the streets.
And to be clear — for all this administration’s talk of “paid agitators,” the protests there came from justifiably furious locals, like this almost absurdly Midwestern man.
You know what really pisses me off is the fact that they detain people, cuff ’em, and still beat the shit out of ’em. They tell you it’s immigrants, it’s only immigrants. It’s fucking anybody. I have friends that got detained and all they were doing was fucking driving home from work. What the fuck?
Sounds like you don’t fit the definition of a…
No, I’m not fucking paid to be here, like everyone fucking says, what the fuck is that? I gotta work in the goddamn morning, just like everybody else. I’m just trying to stand up for community, dude. We’re all human beings here. I don’t give a shit who you are, or where you came from, or what color you are, it doesn’t fucking matter. This is wrong.
JOHN: Yeah, and you know you’re acting like a bunch of dicks when you’re provoking that level of response in Minnesota, a state whose whole thing is being “Minnesota nice.” They put it on merch!
Other states couldn’t pull that off. Especially because “Florida nice” sounds like a brand of pills you buy from the gas station that makes your heart explode.
And I will say, this does seem like a turning point for this administration on immigration.
Polls show the majority of Americans do not approve of what’s been happening. And nor should they, because for all Trump’s talk of targeting “the worst of the worst,” that rings pretty hollow when you see agents doing things like dragging a U.S. citizen out of his house in his underwear through the snow, and taking a 5-year-old into custody.
It’s frankly no wonder anti-I.C.E. sentiment has spread to places you might not even expect, from Pop-Tart the cat, who posted a video with “Fuck I.C.E.” on it, to the subreddit “Massive Cock,” where users captioned dick pics with things like “How hard I get when I think about abolishing I.C.E.,” to an AEW match in Vegas earlier this month, where this happened.
Now the face and the eyes of a champion…
Fuck I.C.E., fuck I.C.E., fuck I.C.E.. Fuck I.C.E. Fuck I.C.E. Fuck I.C.E. Fuck I.C.E.
JOHN: Excellent. Well done, everyone involved — from the crowd getting their point across in the perfect way, to MJF going full “Jim from The Office” into the camera.
The point is, to the extent they ever had it, I.C.E. and Border Patrol have clearly lost the public’s trust.
And it frankly hasn’t helped to see grotesque clips like this one, at Mar-a-Lago on New Year’s Eve, of Kristi Noem, dancing.
♪ ♪
[“Ice Ice Baby” playing]
JOHN: There’s so much weird stuff going on in that clip, you probably didn’t even notice the Ninja Turtle dancing with Vanilla Ice on stage there.
Here’s a better angle, of Michelangelo being photographed at the exact moment he seems to realize just how many people in that room were mentioned in the Epstein files.
Now, I should say — there’ve been some promising developments this week.
Democratic leaders seem to have finally read the public’s anger, and are currently holding up funds for DHS as a whole, as they push for new restrictions on immigration agents.
And on Thursday this happened.
Tonight, Borders czar Tom Homan says the massive immigration operation that’s been going on for months in Minnesota, Operation Metro Surge is coming to an end.
We’ve had great success with this operation, and we’re leaving Minnesota safer. There were some issues here, and we addressed those issues. But I’m not going to sit here and say anybody did anything wrong.
JOHN: Really? Well, first and least importantly: you’re standing. Like, you’re not gonna sit there and say anything because you’re a standing man.
But I think it’s pretty clear a lot of people did a lot of things wrong, not least your tailor, because that suit looks like you bought it off the rack at “Fancy press conference clothes for uncharismatic business Shreks.”
And look, I’m glad for any drawdown that takes place in Minnesota, if it indeed happens. But even if every agent leaves town, much larger problems are going to remain, both there and on the national level, because we’re going to continue to see this administration obsessively pursue Stephen Miller’s stated goal of racking up 3,000 arrests a day.
So given that, we thought for our first show of the year, it might be worth pulling back a bit, and talking about not just Minneapolis, or even just I.C.E., but about the massive agency it’s a part of, the Department of Homeland Security.
Because as you’re about to see, a discussion about it, its funding, and the sweeping powers that we’ve given it, is long overdue.
So tonight, let’s look at DHS.
And let’s start with its origins.
Because while you might assume DHS is a longstanding part of American government, it’s just 23 years old.
It was founded as a response to 9/11, and if you’re too young to remember 9/11 — and I’ll pause long enough for the rest of us to experience the psychic gut punch of that sentence — very basically, in the immediate aftermath of the most devastating terrorist attack in its history, America started screaming, and didn’t really stop for a decade.
And while thankfully, the Riyadh Comedy Festival has since healed the world through comedy and we don’t need to be worried about who or what was actually responsible for 9/11, at the time, a major concern was that, prior to the attacks, there’d been a lack of communication and information sharing between federal agencies.
So, the Bush administration agreed to combine a bunch of them under a single banner to improve coordination.
But even back then, some felt that was a bad idea, to the point it was openly discussed in news coverage.
What do Secret Service agents have in common with animal disease researchers? Nothing, except that in three months both will be working for the new Homeland Security Department, an organizational chart that could give a management expert nightmares. 22 agencies, 170,000 workers, the third-largest department in the government.
JOHN: Okay, first, it’s a little weird to introduce a government agency like it’s a new sitcom.
“What happens when an uptight TSA agent and a laid-back FEMA official have to move in together? Find out in Homeland Security, Thursdays on TBS!”
But the larger point there — that this thing had been hastily cobbled together — very much holds.
Because all of a sudden, DHS contained everything from the Secret Service, to the Coast Guard, to FEMA, and TSA.
But for everything that went in, some key counterterrorism agencies were left out — because DHS had to operate “without the investigative, intelligence, and military powers of the FBI, CIA, and the Pentagon.”
But don’t worry! Remember — they had those pig researchers, so they were pretty much set.
Now, as a result, DHS tried to justify its existence in a number of different ways — including by explicitly linking immigration enforcement with countering terrorism.
In fact, it was during the creation of DHS that parts of the Immigration and Naturalization Service and US Customs Service were combined to form Customs and Border Protection and I.C.E. — the two agencies we know and are being terrorized by today.
But oversight of all this was a nightmare, as the members of Congress that oversaw all these agencies didn’t want to give up control, so DHS found itself answering to around 100 committees and subcommittees.
Which, as the chair of the 9/11 Commission explained, caused chaos.
Think of having a hundred bosses. Think of reporting up this way and that way, trying to do your job, and yet you’re reporting to a hundred people. It’s crazy, because it makes no sense, and you could not do your job under those circumstances.
JOHN: Yeah, that makes sense.
Having an endless cavalcade of rapidly changing bosses would clearly be a distraction, though I gotta say, you do eventually get used to it.
I don’t even know which of these companies is going to be my new business daddy yet!
It’s like a Mamma Mia situation, except less fun and way less sexy.
But incidentally, if it is indeed Netflix, sorry for all the times I called your catalogue a “who’s who” of “the fuck is this.”
Loved the ending “of Stranger Things,” by the way, very brown.
And good luck with Detective Hole! It sounds great!
Now complaints about the unwieldy nature of DHS persisted over the years — and yet, despite that, money kept flowing into it, even as it became known for things like its mass-surveillance programs, particularly of American Muslims, and its widely mocked color-coded terrorism threat chart which never dropped below yellow.
It also became notorious for its willingness to distribute huge amounts of money to local police and emergency services.
In fact, on the ten year anniversary of 9/11, one California news station compiled just some of what that money had been wasted on.
Marin County received more than $100,00 in surveillance equipment to protect its water treatment system from terrorist attack. Four years after the money was handed out, state authorities found $67,000 worth of gear still in boxes. It had never been used. Several counties and cities bought Segway scooters for their bomb squads. Each one cost $4,700.
JOHN: Okay, first, I’m not sure anything says “We have too much money” more than buying a fucking Segway.
And second, that is just an unfathomably dorky look.
It doesn’t scream “brave bomb defuser” as much as “beekeeper mall cop.”
With expenditures like that, it’s no wonder a 2015 report from a Republican senator found that despite spending over half a trillion dollars, “DHS was not successfully executing any of its five main missions.” And its primary counterterrorism programs were “yielding little value.”
But because no one in power back then wanted to break apart something that had “Homeland Security” in its name, DHS remained the largest federal law enforcement agency, with massive funding, sweeping surveillance authority, and worryingly unclear checks on its own power.
It was essentially a loaded weapon, sitting on a president’s desk in the Oval Office, only held back by their personal sense of temperance and restraint, all of which brings us back to this fucking guy.
Because in his first term, Trump and this sleep paralysis demon used DHS to push everything from his Muslim ban to family separation to his efforts to end DACA.
But from the very start of Trump’s second term, it was clear they had much bigger plans for DHS — starting with the fact Trump put one of his biggest allies, Kristi Noem, in charge of it.
And even news stories about her announcement at the time contained some pretty clear hints she was a bad choice.
Tonight, president-elect Donald Trump expected to name one of his staunchest campaign supporters—
Are you ready?
South Dakota governor Kristi Noem to lead the massive Department of Homeland Security. Trump once considered Noem as a potential running mate, but her star dimmed after writing in her memoir that she had shot and killed the family dog.
JOHN: Yeah, not great! And even Trump, who’s been endowed by Satan with an ability to survive any bad press whatsoever, somehow knew that picking a VP who bragged about speed running Old Yeller is a bad move.
No one wants to share a ticket with John Wilkes Woof here.
In fact, Trump was so turned off by Noem’s dog news, he apparently said to Don Jr. afterwards “That’s not good at all, even you wouldn’t kill a dog, and you kill everything.”
Just another brief window into a family dynamic that a skilled therapist would describe as “cha-ching.”
And crucially, Noem didn’t bring a lot of non-dog-murdering experience to the job — she’d never worked in DHS or indeed law enforcement — but in a foreshadowing of things to come, as governor of South Dakota she was a relentless self-promoter.
In ads for her state, she appeared in various job-themed costumes, including a dentist, nurse, electrician, plumber, a welder, and a construction worker, selling each role with incredible charisma.
South Dakota has the blueprint for success. Recently, we led the nation in new homebuilding, but we’re still growing so fast. We need to hire more builders to keep up. So, I’m pitching in.
JOHN: Look, I know her performance is pretty flat there, but in her defense, who is going to tell her she can’t act? Not anyone who likes their dog, that’s for sure.
Also, I’m in a tough spot here.
Because I refuse to comment on a woman’s looks. But one of my female writers has insisted I read something she’s written, and I also refuse to silence women’s voices. So, given that.
[Cheers and applause]
A ponytail for practical working purposes is intended to keep hair off the base of the neck and/or out of the eyes.
If you leave the front part of your hair out and keep the bottom part of your “hair” down loosely around your shoulders it’s not a working ponytail, it’s a hairdo.
And, John, please make sure you put that second “hair” in air quotes, because no way that Clydesdale tail is the real hair of that dog killer with the bad filler.
Her words. Not mine. Believe women.
And the thing is, Noem immediately brought to DHS that same unrelenting focus on P.R.
From shooting a video in the Salvadoran CECOT prison while wearing a $50,000 Rolex, to cosplaying as a law enforcement agent, from wearing a bulletproof vest on the streets of New York, to putting on Coast Guard fatigues, to dressing up like a Border Patrol agent on Fox News.
And if it seems like she’s got cameras with her wherever she goes, she basically does.
Here she is with a camera crew on the roof of an immigration detention facility outside Chicago.
Fun fact: these two men — Kyle Frankovich and Juan Munoz— were protesting outside that day, only to be arrested.
And to hear them tell it, that seemed to have less to do with their actions, and much more with the presence of Noem and her social media crew.
An agent grabbed me, threw me down, I was then zip tied and detained.
I was pulled to the ground and ordered arrested. It felt very much like we were just being used for this political theater.
Kristi Noem was able to walk past us surrounded by photographers, videographers, essentially just getting us in the background as she walked by.
Then look what happened. Homeland Security sent out these social media posts showing Kyle in handcuffs. This one said, “We will not allow violent activists to lay hands on our law enforcement.”
And they also posted this government promotional video, and there’s Kyle again.
He and Munoz were never charged with any crime.
JOHN: That’s true. Despite being labeled “violent activists,” they were never charged with anything.
It seems they were arrested just for a photo op for Kristi Noem, which is — if I may quote her own dog’s dying words — ruff.
But it goes way beyond optics.
Noem has been put in charge of DHS at a moment when it’s experiencing an unprecedented funding surge.
Trump’s big beautiful bill last summer essentially doubled DHS’s funding over the next four years.
And it’s worth looking at where all that money is — and equally importantly, isn’t going.
Because DHS’s resources are now being pointed at immigration more heavily than ever before, to the point it’s being called a veritable “Department of Deportation.”
I.C.E. alone was handed an extra $75 billion to spend over Trump’s term, tripling its annual budget, leading to this startling fact.
Overnight, it became the highest-funded law enforcement agency in U.S. history. If I.C.E. was a military, it would be the 17th richest in the world, worth about the same as Canada’s entire armed forces.
JOHN: It’s true! And whatever the appropriate budget for I.C.E. is — and they’re making a pretty compelling argument for it being zero right now — one thing it should definitely not be is the same as the entire Canadian military.
Though to be fair, that’s not a perfect one to one, as I’m perfect one to one, as I’m military doesn’t totally eat military doesn’t totally eat shit on slightly slippery sidewalks.
Now, a lot of that money is earmarked for immigration detention facilities, the conditions at which we’ve talked about before, and which are unlikely to get better, given ominous headlines like “I.C.E. begins buying mega warehouse detention centers across the U.S.”
But a lot’s also going to hiring thousands of new I.C.E. agents, with DHS planning to spend 100 million dollars over a one year period just on advertising, as part of what it’s called a “wartime recruitment” strategy.
And those ads are everywhere.
Slickly produced social media videos…
Join I.C.E. and help us catch the worst of the worst.
Televised ads targeting local police and a celebrity endorsement. These are all part of a major multimillion-dollar recruitment campaign launched by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
It’s shared images using wartime imagery, like Uncle Sam, and slang, like in this post with the caption, quote, “Want to deport illegals with your absolute boys?”
That’s going to be on social media. It’s going to be through streamers, so YouTube and other places where user-generated content is, but also large-scale broadcast and streaming platforms like Hulu, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, all of this sort of thing.
JOHN: Yeah, I don’t love hearing my employer’s name on that list. Though I guess at least I get a reminder of what the company’s name is this year.
It’s also slightly satisfying to know that one place those ads have been running is in front of AEW wrestling, meaning I.C.E. is having to pay money to appear alongside this.
Fuck I.C.E! Fuck I.C.E! Fuck I.C.E!
JOHN: It’s still very good! Now, DHS claims those ads are working — they say they’ve hired 12,000 new I.C.E. agents and officers since last summer.
And while there are good reasons to believe those figures are inflated, we’re still going to have a lot more I.C.E. agents on our streets this year.
And that should be a real concern, especially because to hire so many officers so quickly, they’ve had to significantly lower their standards for new recruits, doing things like waiving age requirements, condensing the training period, and ending requirements like taking 5 weeks of Spanish language training.
Which is a bad idea for many reasons, including those agents now won’t get to understand even a little bit of Bad Bunny’s music. Which is sad. They’re missing out on a lot of joy, plenty of political commentary, and a metric ton of blow job descriptions. There is a lot and it is a rich text.
And the thing is, even with those lower standards, one report found that more than a third of new I.C.E. recruits had failed a physical fitness test that required 15 pushups, 32 situps, and running 1.5 miles in 14 minutes. Which, and I do not say this lightly, is a test even I could pass.
Also — and more upsettingly — nearly half were later sent home because they couldn’t pass the written exam, which covers things like when officers can and can’t conduct searches and seizures.
And it gets even worse when you learn that during the test, they were allowed to consult their textbook and notes.
Yeah, half of them failed an open book test!
And as we all know, that’s the easiest kind of test. Even easier than urine. That one’s actually harder than you think. Mid-stream is a delicate dance.
And as the former director of I.C.E. points out, this is all a very bad sign.
Yeah, I mean, some of these moves, frankly, have resulted in some embarrassing candidates.
I.C.E. agents have tremendous authority when they’re out there on the streets.
We have to know that these people, A, have that integrity, are going to — when no one’s looking, are they going to do things the right way?
And, secondly, they’re getting into this for the right reason.
Obviously, there’s a tremendous concern as well that the administration is going after individuals who harbor some animus towards immigrants.
JOHN: Right, because it doesn’t seem unfair to assume that some might’ve applied for the job less out of a sense of public duty, and more because they, oh I don’t know, want to “deport illegals with their absolute boys.”
And that concern’s been compounded by a disturbing pattern of white-nationalist dogwhistles in these recruiting ads, like this post, reading “Which way American man?,” evoking a meme associated with this antisemitic book popular among neo-Nazis.
And this one, using the phrase “We’ll have our home again” — the title of a song released by a white nationalist band, popular with far-right groups like the Proud Boys.
And if that connection seems like a stretch to you, you should know: the Proud Boys themselves don’t seem to think so.
On the messaging app Telegram, one chapter reposted that ad next to a picture of a literal dog whistle, adding the line, “Message received.”
JOHN: Oh, cool. Although I do have to say: the whole point of a dog whistle is plausible deniability, so saying “We hear and understand your dog whistle” does sort of wreck the whole agreement.
But I guess that’s the risk you run when your secret master plan has to rely on some of the dumbest people alive.
Now, I have to tell you: we reached out to DHS for comment, in which they angrily deny any dog whistles, saying, “We will not apologize for using patriotic messaging and symbolism in our advertisements,” and also, one could say we are homelandmaxxing by removing illegal aliens and defending our borders” — a sentence I genuinely feel dumber for saying aloud.
So — that’s where money and resources at DHS have been surging to.
But the administration is also pulling resources away from other key parts of her massive agency.
And let’s start with the reallocation of resources just under I.C.E.
Because, for the record, before Trump came along, deportation was not I.C.E.’s sole focus.
It actually consisted of two branches: ERO, or “Enforcement and Removal Operations,” which handles detentions and deportations.
And Homeland Security Investigations or HSI, which is tasked with complex investigations into things like drug smuggling and human trafficking, with many of their targets not even immigrants.
Diddy’s case, for instance, was run by HSI agents.
And many HSI officials have long wanted to be formally separated from I.C.E. — for obvious reasons.
If you need cooperation in a human-trafficking investigation, it’s harder to get it from someone who thinks you might deport them.
But in Trump’s second term, he’s gone hard in the other direction — signing an executive order on day one, announcing enforcing immigration law would be “the primary mission of HSI.”
And that’s had real consequences, as highly-trained agents who specialized in things like money laundering and counterterrorism cases, have now been sent to do things like pick up people in parking lots.
Here’s a guy in an HSI jacket, arresting people at a Home Depot in L.A. last year.
Which isn’t good, because there’s stuff they were supposed to be doing!
In the first part of last year, HSI agents worked an average of 33% fewer hours on child exploitation cases.
Which is maddening.
There’s a reason episodes of “SVU” don’t involve them abandoning a case halfway through, because they have to go spend the rest of the episode harassing people outside of a fucking Lowe’s. People would riot.
But it’s not just reallocations within I.C.E.
Not only have CBP agents been diverted from the border, they’ve pulled in law enforcement from outside DHS — according to one estimate last year, 1 in 5 U.S. Marshalls, one in 5 FBI agents, half of DEA agents, and over two-thirds of ATF agents had been reassigned to help handle deportations.
And look: I’m not saying everything those agencies were doing was a good use of their time. For more on that, see any number of episodes of this show.
But it’s notable that — for all Trump’s justification of immigration crackdowns to fight drugs and cartels — as this former DHS intelligence official points out, that’s exactly what’s being deprioritized.
If FBI agents are not working on drug gang task for forces, then there are fewer investigations into violent street gangs and drug trafficking cartels.
And with such a large contingent pulled from their duties, he says drug cartels and bad actors are watching.
I am 100% certain that they are tracking that federal agents are being moved out of drug task forces and seeking to determine ways to exploit the reduced resources on those task forces.
JOHN: Yeah, of course cartels are going to take advantage.
Drug kingpins, by at large, aren’t stupid. Mostly because drug kingpins who are stupid tend to spend a very short time as kingpins, and much longer as a suspicious mound of earth somewhere in the Mexican desert. It’s kind of a self-editing field.
And I’m still not done listing misallocations of resources.
Because at the same time that Noem’s surged funding to some areas of DHS, she’s actively starved others.
For instance, CISA, which handles cybersecurity, lost roughly 1,000 staffers, more than one-third of the agency, meaning it’s now less equipped to do things like protect our electrical grids or secure our elections.
But maybe the biggest example of a department being hamstrung is FEMA.
It’s the agency that handles the federal response to disasters.
Many believe it never really belonged in DHS in the first place, and that its ending up there contributed to its failures during Hurricane Katrina.
And if you’re too young to remember Hurricane Katrina, I’m afraid you are just gonna have to fuck off.
Suffice to say that FEMA did not have a “good Katrina,” perhaps best summed up by this entirely fair question in front of a flood damaged apartment complex.
Soon after Trump took office, FEMA lost about a third of its total full-time staff.
And it’s also been heavily impacted by a new rule, across DHS, which states that every contract and grant over $100,000 must now cross Noem’s desk for approval — or, to put that in terms Kristi Noem can understand, two wristwatches.
And that requirement is absurd generally, but especially at FEMA, an agency that handles emergency relief that needs to get out quickly.
At one point, “about $17 billion in federal disaster funds for states was held up for an extra layer of review by Noem, causing unusual delays in payments.
And I’d say I can’t even imagine how chaotic that process must look, but luckily, I can.
Because another of Noem’s South Dakota ads literally showed her as an overworked accountant, with ticker-tape all over the place, not exactly doing a terrific job.
We have close to 20,000 open jobs — including accountants. So I’m filling in. South Dakota. Freedom works here.
Governor Noem? You didn’t carry the two.
Josh? Kiss my abacus.
JOHN: Okay, it seems once more I find myself in a tough spot.
Because, again, I’ve been told to read something to you, and I don’t feel like I can say no.
“The precise way for you to describe what Kristi Noem has actively chosen to look like there is, ‘mother of the bride, who asked for the exact same hair as the bride.’
Also, John, while I have your attention, maybe it’s time for you to be putting a little grey in the eyebrow makeup. You’re not fooling anyone. Let’s be adults about this.”
Those are her words. She’s brutally honest. Is a bad person. The future is female.
The thing is, Noem delaying funding approvals at FEMA has already had serious consequences.
When there were deadly floods in Texas last year, did not answer nearly two-thirds of calls to its disaster assistance line, two days after, nearly two thirds of the calls to FEMA’s disaster assistance line went unanswered.
Now, I have to tell you Noem has disputed that report, saying “It’s just false,” and “That report needs to be validified.”
Though I believe that sentence itself could benefit from being “spellecheckered.”
And not for nothing, Noem’s $100,000 sign off rule meant that, according to one former official, the FEMA building itself almost had its utilities shut off last year because the bill wasn’t paid.
And the truth is, so far, we’ve been incredibly lucky there hasn’t been an even worse disaster, where FEMA’s problems were more fully exposed, as last year, for the first time in a decade, not a single hurricane struck the U.S.
But our luck can only hold out for so long.
Last August, over 180 FEMA employees sent a letter to Congress warning that Trump officials’ actions were risking a Katrina-level disaster.
Which is a pretty haunting thing to hear.
And it’s more than a little dispiriting to realize that the Frankenstein of an agency we cobbled together after 9/11 is now siphoning resources away from things that actually protect us, even as it floods resources to a bunch of guys in ski masks with questionable Reddit histories who blast rap rock out the window of their government-issued kidnap-mobiles, all for the benefit of Kristi Noem’s fucking TikTok.
So what can we do?
Well, first, and most immediately, with DHS in partial shutdown over its funding, Democrats have to use every ounce of leverage they’ve got to get major concessions.
Bernie Sanders has proposed an amendment that would resind the $75 billion in additional funding that I.C.E. and DHS received.
And while I don’t know if they’ll be able to get to that, they should at the very least get as many hard, enforceable limits on immigration agents’ activities as possible.
Second, we need to get rid of I.C.E. period.
Public trust in it right now is hovering somewhere between Purdue Pharma and the Titan submersible.
It is just not salvageable.
And if you’re thinking, who will enforce immigration law if I.C.E. is gone?
I dunno, maybe the agencies that did it for decades before 2003.
As for DHS as a whole, I’d argue it’s no longer tenable in its current form.
And while maybe there’s an argument for having a larger agency coordinating different federal departments, it should probably be redesigned from the ground up, and deliberately this time, not by suddenly gluing together org charts in a blind panic.
But if I can make one last, broader point here: cosmetic changes just aren’t going to be enough.
Even if you get rid of Kristi Noem, which you should, Stephen Miller will still be there.
And even if you get rid of him, this administration will remain.
But even if they’re gone, and we get rid of I.C.E. and DHS, we’re still going to be left with the broken immigration laws that give them permission to do what they’ve done.
Millions of people will continue to be vulnerable because — as we’ve discussed repeatedly — our current immigration system makes it somewhere from difficult to impossible for many to “come in the right way.”
That boy in the blue hat and his dad were scooped up, despite being in the process of seeking asylum.
And we’ve shown you multiple videos of people being arrested as they showed up for their immigration appointments.
And that’s actually a bit of a tell!
Because that’s clearly not this administration targeting “the worst of the worst” — it’s them desperately trying to juice up their numbers.
And it’s the law that allows them to do that.
And that’s actually something Tom Homan made a point of reiterating to people when he was first sent to Minnesota two weeks ago.
For the people out there who don’t like what I.C.E. is doing, if you want certain laws reformed, then take it up with Congress.
Again, I.C.E. isn’t making this up. They’re enforcing laws enacted by Congress and signed by president.
The same laws have been on the books for the last six presidents I worked for.
If you don’t like what I.C.E. is doing, instead of protesting this building, go protest Congress, tell them you want changes.
JOHN: Wait, why just one or the other? People could absolutely do both. “Por que no los dos?”
If I may quote a phrase it seems most new I.C.E. recruits will have absolutely no chance of understanding.
But he is right, Trump’s policy of mass deportations is built on existing laws.
And if America doesn’t like what that policy looks like, now they’ve seen what it really means, then it needs to fucking do something about it.
To the extent we’re all horrified by day laborers and grandfathers and little kids in bunny hats being terrorized by men in masks, then we need to elect people who’ll commit to writing laws that reflect that.
And I’ve got to say, it says something that to the extent anyone over the last few months has been protecting our homeland and keeping it secure, it’s not been Kristi Noem in her wide array of fun outfits or whichever 20-year-old dipshit has been pumping out Nazi-flavored content on Twitter.
It’s been ordinary people on the streets of Minneapolis, blowing whistles, delivering food to friends who are afraid to leave their houses, and marching in the cold even though they’ve got goddamn work in the morning, because — if I may quote that gloriously frozen Midwestern man — they believe we’re all human beings here, and this is fucking wrong.
And now this.
Announcer: And now, local news reacts to a Florida delicacy parka.
Welcome back. Freezing weather in South Florida, some people have gotten creative about what to do with all the invasive lizards. Fair warning, take a break from breakfast for just a minute parka.
Iguana meat pizza. Where the iguana’s already dead or dying?
They are stunned.
You can’t eat like a dead animal. That’s a sanitary—
They are killing them? And the eating them. That’s legal?
Yes?
Sanitize.
The fact that you have to identify that it has been sanitized.
This ain’t dirty iguana me to this is sanitized iguana meets.
Excuse me, one more time?
A pizza.
Why?
JOHN: That’s our show. Thank you so much for watching. We’ll see you next week. Good night!
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