Kristi Noem Repeatedly Claimed ICE Deported a Cannibal. It Was “Completely Made Up.”

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem told a preposterous story demonizing immigrants in high-profile public remarks alongside President Donald Trump and on Fox News last summer, about a cannibal who ate other people and then, on his Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportation flight, began to eat himself. At the time, The Intercept was unable to substantiate any part of the tale.

Now, three officials from federal law enforcement agencies — including Noem’s own Department of Homeland Security — with knowledge of the allegations say the entire story was fabricated.

Two other federal law enforcement officials echoed this, telling The Intercept that the claims were ludicrous and that there was no evidence corroborating the story.

Asked for comment, a DHS spokesperson said Noem was simply relaying the claims of an air marshal. “What ‘fabrication’ of the story of the cannibal?” the spokesperson said. “She was told that story on a deportation flight by one of the air marshals.”

Amid growing calls for Noem to resign — after tarring Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti as guilty of “domestic terrorism” in the immediate aftermath of their killings by federal agents — or face impeachment for obstruction of Congress, self-dealing, and violation of public trust, the false story about a supposed cannibal shows that a willingness to deceive the American public began long before Minneapolis.

While falsehoods by Noem and the department have frequently been exposed during Trump’s second term, they are rarely acknowledged, much less corrected, by the secretary or DHS.

“This administration’s pattern of abusing innocent Americans in the street — from tear-gassing kids to shooting and killing citizens — and then turning around and lying about it to try and cover their asses cannot be allowed to continue,” Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., told The Intercept.

Sitting alongside Trump during a July press conference, Noem offered a prime example of the “kind of deranged individuals that are on our streets in America, that we’re trying to target and get out of our country.” Noem said that federal agents 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.” 

Noem also told the story to Fox News’ Jesse Watters, claiming a U.S. Marshal said that the cannibal had previously eaten other people before he began to consume himself aboard an ICE deportation flight.

“Was this bad hombre handcuffed to something and he was trying to chew his arm off so he could escape, or was he just hungry?” Watters asked. “You know, what bothered me the most is that this U.S. Marshal just said it like it was normal,” Noem replied, adding, “He said he was literally eating his own arms. That is what he did. He called himself a cannibal and ate other people and ate himself that day.”

Asked if the story came from Noem or the U.S. Marshals, one official was unequivocal: “Noem.”

The senior official told The Intercept that Noem had crossed a line: “I cannot condone somebody making up a story that absolutely never happened.”

After a July 2025 article by The Intercept on the failure by Noem or DHS to answer questions about the cannibal incident, this reporter regularly asked about it to officials at ICE, DHS, the Marshals Service, and other federal law enforcement agencies.

Noem failed to reply to close to two dozen requests for comment since July.

Months of messages and multiple phone calls finally yielded a non-denial denial. “ICE media folks went to ERO to ask them about it,” Emily Covington, until recently an assistant director in ICE’s Office of Public Affairs, told The Intercept in November. “We do not have information on a flight with a cannibal.” When asked if that was confirmation that the cannibal did not exist, Covington responded: “That is not what I’m saying, whatsoever.”

A Marshals Service spokesperson told The Intercept that information regarding its Justice Prisoner Air Transportation System flights is kept under wraps for the “safety and security of all parties.” 

Members of federal law enforcement — including some speaking off the record — expressed discomfort with having to answer for what they said was a clumsy yarn told by Noem. (All agreed to allow The Intercept to reference these remarks.) “Why would she even say something so insane as this?” asked one of the officials, who said that even a young child would never make up such an outlandish story.

Another was at a loss to explain why Noem would tell a tale that was “obviously utterly false.”

Noem has come under frequent criticism for headline-grabbing stunts, aggressive operations, and hobbyhorse programs of dubious efficacy. The impeachment resolution against Noem for high crimes and misdemeanors, filed in the wake of Pretti’s death last month, now has 187 co-sponsors, a spokesperson for the office of Rep. Robin Kelly, D-Ill., told The Intercept.

“Kristi Noem has blood on her hands,” said Kelly, who introduced the articles of impeachment. “Each time, Secretary Noem lied to our faces and tried to justify the murder of innocent lives. People are disgusted by her.”

Noem’s department has followed her lead when it comes to false statements.

“Border Patrol law enforcement officers were ambushed by domestic terrorists that rammed federal agents with their vehicles. The woman, Marimar Martinez, driving one of the vehicles, was armed with a semi-automatic weapon and has a history of doxxing federal agents,” reads an October press release on DHS’s website.

Recently, Martinez explained to members of Congress how a car driven by federal officers sideswiped her truck and cut her off. “I could hear my back passenger window shatter, and I felt bullets continue to pierce my body,” she testified. “As I attempted to drive to a safe location, I began to feel lightheaded. I looked down and saw blood gushing out of my arms and legs and realized I had been shot multiple times.”

“I am outraged that Marimar Martinez is still being smeared as a ‘domestic terrorist’ on DHS’s official website, despite DOJ rightfully dropping all its baseless charges against her,” said Duckworth.

DHS did not respond to a request about why Martinez is still cast as a domestic terrorist on their website.

Martinez’s case is typical. A 2025 Associated Press investigation of federal criminal cases against anti-immigration protesters in four Democratic-led cities found that of 100 people initially charged with felony assaults on federal agents, 55 saw their charges reduced to misdemeanors or dismissed outright. At least 23 pleaded guilty, most of them to reduced charges resulting in scant or no jail time.

In case after case, however, DHS refuses to acknowledge dropped or reduced charges. The department accused Francisco Longoria of attempting to “run over” Customs and Border Protection officers and injuring them with his pickup truck. Criminal charges against Longoria were ultimately dropped. Still, DHS recently cited Longoria in a press release about “vehicle attacks” on immigration officers.

Noem and DHS routinely paint immigrants rounded up by DHS as the worst of the worst — and even created a website to showcase such persons. But last week, DHS admitted that the site was rife with inaccuracies and that the charges against hundreds of immigrants listed were incorrect.

Noem routinely peddles blatant falsehoods before Congress, during press conferences, and on television and has been excoriated for it by editorial boards from the mainstream New York Times to the right-wing Free Press. Lawmakers have similarly called her out for what Michigan Rep. Haley Stevens termed “nonstop lies to the American people.” 

Noem, for instance, declared “no American citizens have been arrested or detained. We focus on those that are here illegally,” during an October 30 press conference in Gary, Indiana. She added that claims to the contrary are “simply not true and false reporting.” 

But less than a month before, federal agents conducted a pre-dawn military-style raid — personally overseen by Noem — on a home in Illinois, using armored vehicles, a helicopter, and officers in tactical gear with high-powered rifles. That flashy operation resulted in the detention and arrests of two U.S. citizens. Last October, a ProPublica investigation documented 170 cases of U.S. citizens who were arrested by immigration agents during Trump’s second term.

During a December House Homeland Security Committee hearing, Noem falsely claimed that the DHS had “not deported U.S. citizens or military veterans.” Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., then released a letter from Noem, dated September 2, 2025, that reads: “Regarding your question on the number of veterans that have been removed since January 20, 2025, ICE has removed eight veterans.”

The vilification by Noem and DHS of Martinez, Longoria, Good, Pretti, and others is far more dangerous than her cannibal fiction — but the latter is part of a larger effort to demonize immigrants and those that support them. For centuries, claims of cannibalism have been used to justify all manner of racism, violence, and territorial conquest.

For years, Trump has leaned on this racialized rhetoric and also expressed a fascination with the fictional serial killer and cannibal Hannibal Lecter. During his most recent presidential campaign, Trump frequently mentioned Lecter during rants about immigrants. “They’re rough people, in many cases from jails, prisons, from mental institutions, insane asylums. You know, insane asylums, that’s ‘Silence of the Lambs’ stuff,” Trump said in 2024. “Hannibal Lecter, anybody know Hannibal Lecter?”

Since taking office a second time, Trump has continued to talk about Lecter. “The late great Hannibal Lecter, right? The fake news would say, ‘Why does he talk about that? He’s a fictional character.’ He’s not. We have many of them that came across the border,” Trump said last year, prior to Noem’s comments. “But when the people went to the voting booth, then we understood why he talked about that because they voted for us. They say, ‘We don’t want Hannibal Lecter in our country.’”

Right-wing influencers on social media and pro-Trump media outlets seized on Noem’s “horrifying” cannibal claims to criticize Democrats, demonize immigrants, and call for “mass roundups” and “mass deportations” of “sub-human pieces of trash.” What followed were increasingly brutal anti-immigrant crackdowns across the country by the Trump administration.

Noem and her agency remain under fire in the wake of the killings of Good and Pretti last month. The Department of Homeland Security shut down earlier this month after Republicans failed to agree to Democrats’ demands for new restrictions on federal immigration agents, including a ban on masked officers, requirements that agents wear visible identification, and a mandate that DHS obtains warrants from judges to make arrests in homes.

“Kristi Noem and other officials in this administration have proven beyond a doubt that they cannot be trusted to credibly investigate their own agents’ abuses, let alone implement the commonsense safeguards that Democrats are pushing for,” Duckworth told The Intercept. “That’s why it’s so important we get these DHS reforms codified into law.”