Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s relationship with U.S. Coast Guard officials has become strained throughout her first year leading the department, according to two U.S. officials, a Coast Guard official and a former Coast Guard official.
The tensions between Noem and the only branch of the U.S. military overseen by DHS stem from some early decisions she made that rankled Coast Guard officials, including a verbal directive to shift Coast Guard resources from a search-and-rescue mission to find a missing service member, the sources said.
So she’s the “let them drown” kind of Coast Guard boss.
Noem’s focus on meeting the Trump administration’s deportation quotas appears poised to further impact Coast Guard operations in the coming months, according to new guidance recently issued to Coast Guard Air Station Sacramento this year. Based on DHS priorities, the air station, which is among those responsible for a majority of deportation flights, has designated its first priority to be the transport of detained immigrants on its C-27 aircraft within the U.S., according to multiple U.S. officials familiar with the orders.
The new orders moved search-and-rescue operations, which have long been the Coast Guard’s core mission, to a lower priority, the officials familiar with the orders said. They said counternarcotics efforts and Coast Guard training are prioritized above search-and-rescue operations.
A word of advice: stay away from bodies of water until the Trump regime is over.
The dissonance between Noem’s priorities and senior Coast Guard officials is a lesser-known part of the fallout from President Donald Trump’s mass deportations policy, and is largely playing out behind the scenes. Coast Guard officials have privately raised concerns with each other and confided in former officials about some of Noem’s directives and use of Coast Guard resources to service her and the administration’s priorities, the current and former Coast Guard officials said.
At times, the tensions have escalated into confrontations, the sources said. In one contentious incident in May, Noem’s top adviser, Corey Lewandowski, berated Coast Guard flight staff and threatened to fire them for taking off without one of the secretary’s personal items on board — a heated blanket, according to the current and former Coast Guard officials.
Let people drown, but don’t you dare forget to pack Noem’s heated blanket.
“The primary mission was search-and-rescue,” the former Coast Guard official said. “And now the number one stated mission of the Coast Guard is border security, that is a cultural change that the culture hasn’t quite caught up to.”
The official added that under Noem’s leadership “you never know what’s going to happen” and that morale at Coast Guard headquarters “is terrible.”
Same applies to Trump and all of us.
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