Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem gave a bizarre and sickening account Tuesday of how federal agents nabbed a purported cannibal illegal migrant who started to eat his own arms during a deportation flight.
Noem shared the disturbing anecdote while visiting the “Alligator Alcatraz” deportation camp in the South Florida Everglades alongside President Trump.
“The other day I was talking to some [US] Marshals that had been partnering with ICE,” Noem recounted. “They said that they had detained a cannibal and put him on a plane to take him home 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.”
Noem, the former governor of South Dakota, used the story to argue that federal agents are targeting the worst of the worst illegal migrants in the US — rather than hard-working, upstanding community members, as critics of the administration claim.
“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,” she added.
The Department of Homeland Security could not immediately provide corroborating details of any case to match Noem’s story.
Florida built the detention center, located about 40 miles west of Miami and surrounded by alligator- and python-infested swampland, in just eight days after the Trump administration accepted the state’s offer to use the 39-square-mile plot of land to assist its mass deportation effort.
Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis told reporters that he expected the first detainees to arrive at the facility Wednesday.
The administration has also pushed for those in the US illegally to self-deport in exchange for the promise of being allowed legal entry in the future.
“If you don’t [self-deport], you may end up here,” Noem said. “And you may end up here and being processed, deported out of this country, and never get the chance to come back.”
“Why would you want to come through Alligator Alcatraz if you can just go home on your own?” DeSantis asked rhetorically. “I think a lot of people are going to make that decision.”
