Four months after President Trump fired Kristi Noem as Secretary of Homeland Security, her face may still be greeting travelers at U.S. airports. That is about to change. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin's office sent an email to Customs and Border Protection last week directing the agency to pull any videos featuring Noem that remain on screens at airports and other ports of entry.
The directive, first obtained by HuffPost, asked CBP to check whether the videos were still airing and, if so, to take them down promptly. The email's language was polite but pointed: "If so, please kindly remove them as soon as possible and provide confirmation of removal."
The cleanup is part of a broader pattern. Since taking over the department, Mullin has systematically reversed Noem-era branding, policies, and spending decisions that critics, including many within the administration, viewed as more about personal promotion than homeland security.
Noem's tenure at DHS was marked by an unusual appetite for the camera. She featured prominently in a $220 million ad campaign that showed her riding a horse near Mount Rushmore. She appeared in PSA-style videos warning illegal immigrants not to come to the United States or face deportation. She told lawmakers that President Trump himself had signed off on the controversial campaign.
Whatever the president's level of involvement, the optics were hard to defend. A cabinet secretary starring in cinematic ads, on the taxpayer's dime, raised questions about whether the money served the department's mission or the secretary's brand. The fact that "glamour shots" of Noem hung on CBP walls, as The Independent reported, only reinforced the impression. Those portraits came down days after Trump fired her.
Yet the videos apparently lingered. That it took roughly four months after Noem's departure for the department to formally order their removal says something about the depth of the branding effort, or about bureaucratic inertia, or both.
Mullin has taken a conspicuously different approach. Where Noem sought the spotlight, Mullin has opted for a lower-profile posture on immigration enforcement. The contrast is deliberate and extends well beyond pulling airport videos.
He ordered the removal of "Protect the Homeland" branding from DHS vehicles, a move Politico reported as his most recent action to make the department's fleet more discreet. He reversed Noem's policy requiring her personal sign-off on any contract or grant worth more than $100,000, a bottleneck that concentrated decision-making authority in the secretary's office. He scaled back plans to acquire warehouses for immigration detention holding centers. And he returned ICE training to what the department described as its regular standard, unwinding whatever changes Noem had put in place.
Taken together, these moves amount to a quiet but thorough housecleaning. Mullin is not publicly criticizing his predecessor. He is simply undoing her work, one policy at a time.
Noem's video campaign ran into trouble even before she was fired. During a government shutdown, she produced a video blaming Democrats for the crisis, a message that aired while TSA employees went without pay. Several airports refused to show it, citing the Hatch Act, the federal law that bars civilian government employees from engaging in partisan political activity.
That airports themselves felt compelled to invoke federal ethics law to block a DHS secretary's video tells a story on its own. The content had crossed from public service messaging into political messaging, and the people running the terminals knew it.
Noem's tenure was not only defined by self-promotion. She led aggressive immigration enforcement operations that produced real consequences. Federal agents killed two U.S. citizens during protests connected to those operations, and dozens of others were injured. Those events drew intense scrutiny and remain among the most serious incidents of the Trump administration's broader enforcement push.
The full circumstances, who the citizens were, where and when the incidents occurred, remain unclear from available official accounts. But the human cost added to the sense that Noem's leadership combined high-profile theatrics with high-stakes operations that sometimes went badly wrong.
DHS is the largest law enforcement agency in the federal government. CBP alone fields tens of thousands of officers at hundreds of ports of entry. The department's credibility depends on the public seeing it as a serious, mission-driven institution, not a platform for any one official's personal brand.
Mullin appears to understand that. His changes are not ideological reversals. He is not softening enforcement or retreating from border security. He is stripping away the self-promotional apparatus his predecessor built and returning the department to something closer to standard operating procedure.
The Independent has asked DHS for comment on the video removal directive. No response has been reported.
Several questions remain unanswered. Which airports were still running Noem's videos? Has CBP confirmed compliance? And who, exactly, approved a $220 million ad campaign that turned a cabinet secretary into a spokesmodel on horseback?
Taxpayers deserve answers. At minimum, they deserve a Homeland Security Department that spends its budget securing the homeland, not producing campaign reels for the person who happens to run it.
