During her tenure at DHS, Noem became a figurehead of cruelty for those immigration policies. A fan of photo ops and publicity stunts, she traveled to El Salvador last year to pose in front of a cage full of shirtless, tattooed prisoners at Cecot, the massive prison camp to which many immigrants from the US were summarily shipped without due process in the early months of the Trump administration. She similarly traveled to the Florida Everglades to pose at the camp called “Alligator Alcatraz”, a tent city in the southern swamp in which immigrants were detained in bunk beds behind chain link cages. At each of these stops, Noem made sure to contrast the brutality of the concentration camps where she was being photographed with her own coiffed, powdered, and surgically enhanced appearance; she was always made up in exaggerated Maga style, a Trump hat over her beachy waves.