Four months after President Trump fired Kristi Noem as Secretary of Homeland Security, her face may still be greeting travelers at U.S. airports. Her successor, Markwayne Mullin, sent an email to Customs and Border Protection last week asking the agency to check whether videos featuring Noem are still running at airports and ports of entry, and to take them down immediately if so.
The directive, first obtained by HuffPost and reported by The Independent, is the latest move in what amounts to a quiet but thorough scrubbing of Noem's personal brand from the department she once ran. It also raises a fair question: How does a $220 million ad campaign featuring the secretary herself manage to outlast the secretary by months?
Mullin's office emailed CBP, DHS's largest law enforcement agency, asking whether any Noem videos were currently playing at airports or other ports of entry. The email's language was polite but pointed.
"If so, please kindly remove them as soon as possible and provide confirmation of removal."
The Independent asked DHS for comment. No response was included in its reporting.
The video request is only one piece of a broader effort by Mullin to strip Noem's personal imprint from the department. Within days of her firing, so-called "glamor shots" of Noem hanging on CBP walls were taken down. Mullin has since reversed a policy that required Noem to personally sign off on any contract or grant worth more than $100,000, a bottleneck that effectively centralized spending authority around the former secretary.
He also scaled back plans Noem had set in motion to acquire warehouses for immigration detention holding centers. And he returned ICE training to its regular standard, though the specifics of what Noem had changed were not detailed.
His most recent step, reported by HuffPost and confirmed by Politico, involved removing "Protect the Homeland" branding from DHS vehicles to make them more discreet. Taken together, the pattern is clear: Mullin is opting for a lower-profile approach to immigration enforcement, one that prioritizes operational results over public spectacle.
The videos Mullin wants removed are artifacts of Noem's tenure, during which she prominently featured herself in DHS advertisements and public service announcements. The most notable was a $220 million ad campaign that included footage of Noem riding a horse near Mount Rushmore, imagery more suited to a gubernatorial re-election bid than a federal law enforcement agency.
She also appeared in PSA-style videos warning illegal immigrants not to come to the United States or risk deportation. The messaging may have been sound. The execution, starring the cabinet secretary as spokesperson, drew scrutiny from lawmakers who questioned the campaign's cost and purpose.
Noem told lawmakers that the president had signed off on the controversial campaign. That claim has not been independently verified in available reporting.
During a government shutdown triggered by lawmakers who refused to fund DHS over its immigration enforcement operations, airports refused to air one of Noem's videos, a spot that blamed Democrats for the shutdown. Airport officials cited the Hatch Act, which prohibits civilian federal employees from engaging in partisan activities. TSA employees, meanwhile, went without pay during the shutdown.
The financial controversies surrounding Noem extended well beyond DHS. Before her firing, reports surfaced that she and her husband Bryon carried millions in personal debt, even as questions mounted about the family's finances.
Mullin inherited a department that had been shaped, visually and operationally, around Noem's personal brand. The contrast between the two leaders is striking. Where Noem sought the camera, Mullin appears to be seeking distance from it. Where Noem centralized authority over contracts and grants, Mullin has loosened the reins. Where Noem pushed aggressive, high-visibility enforcement operations, Mullin has moved toward a quieter posture.
None of this means Mullin is going soft on immigration enforcement. His approach simply trades the made-for-television style for something closer to standard federal law enforcement practice. That shift has already drawn its own friction, Mullin recently clashed with Rep. DeLauro over border policy in a contentious committee hearing that required the chair to intervene.
The leadership upheaval at DHS has not been limited to the secretary's office. The broader shake-up included the departure of Border Patrol Chief Michael Banks, who resigned amid what amounted to an exodus of senior officials.
Even Noem's post-DHS career has generated controversy. After her firing, three of her staffers were placed on leave after following her from DHS to the State Department, a move that raised questions about whether she was attempting to transplant her inner circle into a new agency.
The broader lesson here is not about Noem's personality or even her politics. It is about what happens when a federal official treats a cabinet agency as a personal platform. A $220 million ad campaign featuring the secretary herself. PSA videos that doubled as political messaging. Branding on vehicles. Portraits on walls. A contract-approval policy that funneled authority through one person's desk.
These are not the hallmarks of effective governance. They are the hallmarks of someone who confused the job with the spotlight.
Taxpayers funded those ads. Taxpayers paid for those videos. And four months after Noem's departure, taxpayers are still paying, in the form of bureaucratic time and effort required to track down and remove content that should never have been so personalized in the first place.
Meanwhile, the personal scandals surrounding the Noem family have continued to unfold, further complicating any narrative that her tenure at DHS was defined by disciplined, mission-focused leadership.
Mullin's quiet cleanup is the right call. A law enforcement agency should be defined by its mission, not by the face of whoever happens to run it. That Noem's videos were apparently still rolling at airport terminals months after she was fired tells you everything about how deeply the self-promotion had been embedded, and how much work it takes to undo it.
When your agency's biggest branding problem is removing the last secretary's face from the walls and the screens, the previous secretary was doing the wrong job.
