Remember back in June when Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem went on Fox News and told Jesse Watters a wild story about a cannibal on a deportation flight who tried to eat his own arms? The tale was grotesque, theatrical, and designed to make Americans afraid of immigrants.
It was also, according to multiple federal law enforcement officials, entirely made up.
The Intercept reported Monday that several federal officials — including one from the Department of Homeland Security itself — have confirmed that Noem’s cannibal deportation story never happened. Not a single element of it was real.
“That is completely made up,” a senior federal law enforcement official told the outlet. “That never happened.”
Two additional law enforcement officials said there was no evidence whatsoever to support Noem’s claims.
One source said officials specifically went to ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division to investigate the alleged incident. They found nothing — because there was nothing to find.
“There was no information about it. It never took place. It’s a lie,” the source said.
A Cannibal Deportation Story That Never Added Up
Even at the time, Noem’s account didn’t pass the smell test. When pressed for details during her original Fox News appearance, she couldn’t offer a single coherent fact.
She stumbled through a vague description, saying the man “called himself a cannibal, ate other people, and ate himself.”
She claimed an air marshal had told her the story, but couldn’t provide any specifics about the flight, the individual, or when it supposedly happened.
She later repeated the story while touring what critics have dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz” — the Trump administration’s controversial detention facility built in the Florida Everglades.
Each telling was designed to accomplish the same thing: dehumanize immigrants and justify the administration’s increasingly extreme deportation machine.
The Real Numbers Tell a Different Story
Noem trotted out her fictional cannibal as an example of the “kind of deranged individuals” being removed from the country under Trump’s mass deportation campaign.
She repeated President Trump’s immigration lie that countries “emptied their insane asylums and prisons” into our country.
But the actual data paints a very different picture of who ICE is targeting.
CBS News reported that fewer than 14% of immigrants arrested by ICE during Trump’s first year back in office had charges or convictions for violent criminal offenses.
That means the overwhelming majority of people swept up in these operations are not violent criminals, let alone cannibals from a horror movie.
They are workers, parents, students, and community members — many of whom have lived in the United States for years or even decades.
But facts have never been the point. The point is fear. The point is making ordinary Americans picture something monstrous when they think about their immigrant neighbors, so that they won’t ask too many questions when ICE agents in masks drag people out of their homes without judicial warrants.
A Pattern of Deception at DHS
Noem’s fabricated cannibal deportation story isn’t an isolated incident. It’s part of a broader pattern of dishonesty coming from the Department of Homeland Security.
The agency has been accused of running coordinated smear campaigns and spreading disinformation to justify its operations and silence its critics.
Meanwhile, calls for Noem’s resignation continue to grow. Republican senators Thom Tillis and Lisa Murkowski have both publicly called on her to step down, joining a growing bipartisan chorus that has lost confidence in her leadership.
Beyond the lies, Noem has also drawn scrutiny for reportedly exposing DHS employees to asbestos in agency buildings and for her general mismanagement of the department.
Why This Matters
It might be tempting to laugh off the cannibal deportation story as just another absurd moment in an administration overflowing with them.
But there’s nothing funny about a senior government official inventing dehumanizing lies about an entire population of people to justify stripping them of their rights.
Every fabricated horror story makes it easier to look away when real human beings are separated from their families.
Every lie about “deranged” immigrants makes it easier to accept children being detained in cages, sick infants being abandoned at the border, and communities being terrorized by masked federal agents who refuse to identify themselves.
Kristi Noem didn’t just make up a story. She manufactured fear and aimed it directly at some of the most vulnerable people in the country.
And she did it from one of the most powerful positions in the federal government, on national television, without a shred of accountability — until now.
The officials who spoke to The Intercept did so because they believe the truth still matters. The question is whether the rest of the country still agrees.
Caricature of Kristi Noem was created by DonkeyHotey on Flickr. CC BY-SA 2.0
Resist Hate is a progressive media organization covering civil rights, democracy, and social justice.
