Kristi Noem Says $200 Million Ad Campaign Thanking Trump Was His Idea

NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland  — The Department of Homeland Security has budgeted up to $200 million to run anti-immigrant ads in the United States and overseas that repeatedly thank President Donald Trump for leading an immigration crackdown. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Friday night that these ads were Trump’s idea, and during the administration’s transition to power, the president asked her to star in ads thanking him “for closing the border.”

Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference’s Ronald Reagan dinner on Friday night — at a tux and gown affair that served striploin, mashed potatoes, and raspberry cake — Noem recalled Trump telling her after she was nominated: “I want you to do [ads] for the border, and I want you to do those everywhere, not just in the United States, but I want them around the world. I want you to tell people not to come to this country if they’re going to come here illegally.”

She said the president continued: “We’re not going to let the media tell this story, because the media will never tell the truth. We’re going to run a marketing campaign to make sure the American people know the truth of what you’re doing.” 

The ad campaign amounts to an extremely expensive taxpayer-funded propaganda blitz to scare off migrants and to flatter Trump on television. On Friday, Trump’s DHS secretary entertained the CPAC high-roller audience with her account of how Trump orchestrated the whole thing. 

Noem said that Trump instructed that he didn’t want to be in the ads himself, telling her: “I want you in the ads, and I want your face in the ads … but I want the first ad, I want you to thank me. I want you to thank me for closing the border.”

She recalled: “I said, ‘Yes, sir, I will thank you for closing the border.’ So if you notice, in that ad, we thanked him for closing the border.”

The Homeland Security Department announced this week that it was launching ads “on radio, broadcast, and digital, in multiple countries and regions in various dialects.” 

In the domestic version of the ad, Noem says: “Thank you, President Donald J. Trump, for securing our border, for deporting criminal illegal immigrants, and for putting America first.”

Noem noted on Friday that she used “strong language in those ads,” saying she told undocumented immigrants: “If you leave voluntarily, you may have the opportunity to have the American dream, but if we have to come looking for you and hunt you down, then you have lost that chance. And I don’t think there’s ever been a secretary that has said that before, much less a president, and these ads are running not just in the United States. They’re going to run in the Middle East. They’re going to run in Central America. They’re going to run throughout the world, letting the world know that America has a new leader.“

Trump’s pricey ad campaign to thank him and terrify immigrants and their families comes amid his broader purge of the federal government — in partnership with the world’s richest man, Elon Musk — as part of a supposed hunt for government waste, fraud, and abuse.