By sending the South Dakota National Guard to the border, the governor built her national profile but paid less attention to the legal details.
By Isaac Stanley-Becker and Peter Jamison, The Washington PostSouth Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem visits the U.S. border with Mexico on Monday, July 26, 2021, near McAllen, Texas. The Republican governor deployed roughly 50 National Guard troops to help with Texas’ push to arrest people crossing illegally and charge them with state crimes. In June 2021, the South Dakota Republican was preparing to announce that her state would be the first to send National Guard troops to the U.S.
Politically, the work paid off. President-elect Donald Trump earlier this month picked Noem to lead the Department of Homeland Security, a sprawling agency of more than 260,000 people charged with border enforcement, disaster response and other law enforcement responsibilities.ADVERTISEMENT The deployments all together cost about $3.3 million, prompted questions about the legality of the private funding and helped fuel a bitter dispute between Noem and South Dakota’s Native American tribes after she alleged that cartel activity on reservations justified the National Guard’s deployment.
But it’s the claim she staked to border security that is especially relevant to the portfolio she’ll assume if confirmed as homeland security secretary. And it points to the kind of boundary-pushing tactics Noem may be willing to spearhead in carrying out Trump’s promise of mass deportations. South Dakota’s troops conducted observation along the Rio Grande between Del Rio and McAllen, Texas, according to internal emails. They were armed with assault rifles, according to a recommendation included in the emails, but advised that immigrant detention was beyond their remit, instead falling to U.S. Border Patrol.
The donation came from a family foundation in Franklin, Tennessee, funded by Johnson, the founder and former chief executive of a vehicle auction company. A foundation tax filing identifies the purpose of the $1 million donation: “to assist in the best interest of the state of South Dakota.” Johnson has donated widely to Republican candidates, including more than $1 million in recent years to pro-Trump political committees, according to federal records.
“This is a different approach,” Marlette added, “but I think it delivers the Governor’s important messages and defeats the media’s misguided assumptions that this is political, illegal or not within her powers.” The volume of activity documented by South Dakota’s soldiers varied widely, according to internal Guard documents. Some days, they observed hundreds of migrants attempting to cross the border. At other points, they went as many as five days without any encounters. “Very slow day,” stated one situation report prepared by the National Guard.An especially traumatic moment arrived in August 2021, when a sergeant identified a child who had crossed the river and wasn’t breathing.
In Minnehaha County, the state’s most populous jurisdiction, which includes Sioux Falls, 85 to 95 percent of the fentanyl emanates from across the southern border, estimated the county sheriff, Michael Milstead, who also chairs the National Sheriffs’ Association’s drug enforcement committee. The county’s chief prosecutor, Republican Daniel Haggar, deferred to the sheriff on the source of the drugs and said he lacked other statistics to fill in the picture.
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