Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem added another dehumanizing label on Tuesday to her list of descriptors meant to justify the rounding up of migrants: cannibals.
The Republican joined President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) in touring the state’s controversial new migrant detention facility, nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz.” The facility is a product of the Trump administration’s wider ongoing effort to incarcerate and deport the country’s immigrant population.
At a roundtable following the tour, Noem repeated her previous accusations that media outlets like CNN are lying “every single day about what these operations are” — and echoed the GOP talking point that the Department of Homeland Security is “going after murderers and rapists and traffickers and drug dealers.”
Then the secretary began telling a bizarre story about how U.S. marshals working with Immigration and Customs Enforcement told her they detained a cannibal and put him on a deportation flight. (Watch the video below.)
“And while they had him in his seat, he started to eat himself. And they had to get him off and get him medical attention,” she told reporters. “These are the kind of deranged individuals that are on our streets in America, that we’re trying to target and get out of our country because they are so deranged they don’t belong here.”
Tuesday is not the first time Noem shared the story of an alleged cannibal. On Friday, the secretary told the same anecdote to Jesse Waters on Fox News, saying the man was eating his own arm while shackled.
“That is what he did,” she said. “He called himself a cannibal, ate other people and ate himself.”
It should be strongly noted that there is no evidence supporting Noem’s anecdote. HuffPost has reached out to both DHS and ICE to see if they could verify the story, which didn’t include the alleged man’s name, location or country of origin. Neither agency immediately responded.
Noem and the rest of the Trump administration have repeatedly used racist, xenophobic and dehumanizing language to describe immigrants, painting them as rabid “invaders” dangerous to society and the American way of life.
Experts say the language is meant to justify the animus and the violent raids against migrants, including at immigration courthouses where people with no criminal record are pursuing citizenship the legal way. Several studies have found that immigrants and asylum-seekers are less likely to commit crimes than native-born U.S. citizens.