Kristi Noem names new Ice leadership and vows to punish media ‘leakers’

Homeland security secretary Kristi Noem on Sunday announced new leadership at the agency tasked with immigration enforcement as she also pledged to step up lie detector tests on employees to identify those who may be leaking information about operations to the media.

Noem confirmed, in addition, that the government will expand immigration detention operations further into the military sphere, following reports of the intention to use the huge Fort Bliss army base close to the US-Mexico border in Texas for that purpose.

“There is, yes, a plan to use the facility at Fort Bliss for detention,” she said.

The secretary also warned that her department has “just weeks” before running out of money for its mass deportation mission unless Congress ups funding.

“The authorities that I have under the Department of Homeland Security are broad and extensive, and I plan to use every single one of them to make sure that we’re following the law, that we are following the procedures in place to keep people safe and that we’re making sure we’re following through on what President Trump has promised,” Noem told Face the Nation on CBS.

While these polygraph exams are typically not admissible in court, they are frequently used by federal law enforcement agencies and for national security clearances.

White House officials have previously expressed frustration with the pace of deportations, blaming it in part on recent leaks revealing cities where authorities planned raids.

This despite the department’s publicity blitz about raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), invitations to journalists to accompany agents and also witness deportation flights and questions about the facts Ice is issuing and the justifications they are using for arresting, detaining and deporting some of those affected.

Todd Lyons, the former assistant director of field operations for the agency’s enforcement arm, will serve as acting Ice director. Madison Sheahan, secretary of the Louisiana department of wildlife and fisheries and Noem’s former aide when she was governor of South Dakota, has been tapped to be the agency’s deputy director.

The leadership changes come after Ice’s acting director Caleb Vitello was reassigned on February 21 for failing to meet anti-immigration expectations, Reuters reported. Two other top immigration enforcement officials were reassigned February 11.

The Trump administration deported 37,660 people during the president’s first month back in office, DHS data first reported by Reuters last month show, far less than the monthly average of 57,000 people removed from the US in the last full year of Joe Biden’s administration.

Arrest rates were higher than usual in the first few weeks of the Trump administration, a Guardian analysis showed, but arrests and detentions do not always translate into removals and, at the same time, the numbers of people crossing the US-Mexico border without authorization has dropped dramatically since last summer, first under new Biden restrictions and now further under Trump.

Noem said on Friday that the agency planned to prosecute two “leakers of information”.

On Sunday, she said these two people “were leaking our enforcement operations that we had planned and were going to conduct in several cities and exposed vulnerabilities”. She said they could face up to 10 years in federal prison. A DHS spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Reuters and the Associated Press contributed reporting