Kristi Noem

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Biography

Kristi Lynn Arnold was born November 30, 1971, in Watertown, South Dakota, and raised on her family’s ranch and farm near Hazel. She left college early after her father was killed in a 1994 grain-bin accident to help run the family farm, and completed her B.A. in political science at South Dakota State University in 2012 while serving in Congress. She married Bryon Noem and has three children.

Noem won South Dakota’s at-large U.S. House seat in 2010, defeating Democratic incumbent Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, and served in Congress from 2011 to 2019. Elected governor in 2018, she became South Dakota’s first woman governor and gained national conservative profile by refusing every COVID-19 restriction — she imposed no statewide business or church closures, no shelter-in-place order, and no mask mandate, a record she has repeatedly touted as proof her “freedom-focused” approach worked. She drew further attention in 2024 when her memoir No Going Back described her shooting her 14-month-old dog Cricket, and contained a since-removed passage falsely claiming she had met North Korean leader Kim Jong Un — a claim her publisher cut from later editions (PBS NewsHour, May 3, 2024). As governor she was also the subject of an ethics inquiry over her daughter Kassidy Peters’s appraiser licensing; a 2022 legislative panel found Peters received special treatment, and Noem sought to avoid a public ethics hearing and seal records (PBS News, 2022).

The U.S. Senate confirmed Noem as Secretary of Homeland Security on January 25, 2025, by a 59–34 vote (DHS.gov, January 25, 2025). One day later, reporting revealed she had secretly received $80,000 in dark money while serving as governor (reported January 26, 2025). As secretary she functioned as the public face and operational implementer of the administration’s mass-deportation agenda, maintaining a near-daily standing call with Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller; former DHS official Miles Taylor publicly characterized her as “not a policy heavyweight.” She personally accompanied ICE on raids, and in a May 2025 meeting she and Miller pressed ICE to make 3,000 arrests per day (Axios, May 28, 2025). In November 2025 the Justice Department admitted in court that Noem personally authorized continuing deportation flights to El Salvador’s CECOT prison after a federal judge ordered the planes to turn back (NBC News, November 26, 2025).

In January 2026, federal agents in Minneapolis killed two U.S. citizens — Renee Nicole Good (January 7) and Alex Pretti (January 24). In both cases Noem publicly branded the victims “domestic terrorists” within hours, before any investigation; video evidence and witness testimony subsequently contradicted her accounts (PolitiFact, January 8, 2026; CBS News, January 25, 2026). The shootings, plus a Portland shooting on January 8, drove mainstream impeachment calls and articles of impeachment (H.Res.996). On March 5, 2026, Trump fired her — the first Cabinet firing of his second term — and reassigned her as Special Envoy for the “Shield of the Americas” initiative.

Sources

1. Kristi Noem — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristi_Noem
2. Kristi Noem Biography — Britannica (2025). https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kristi-Noem
3. NOEM, Kristi — U.S. House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives. https://history.house.gov/People/Detail/19064
4. U.S. Senate Confirms Kristi Noem as Secretary of Homeland Security — DHS.gov, January 25, 2025. https://www.dhs.gov/news/2025/01/25/us-senate-confirms-kristi-noem-secretary-homeland-security
5. Noem caught lying about meeting Kim Jong Un in memoir — PBS NewsHour, May 3, 2024. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/south-dakota-gov-kristi-noem-erroneously-describes-meeting-with-kim-jong-un-in-new-book
6. Documents show Gov. Kristi Noem tried to avoid ethics hearing, seal records — PBS News, 2022. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/documents-show-gov-kristi-noem-tried-to-avoid-ethics-hearing-seal-records