Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was slammed online for recent comments she made about the Los Angeles community amid ongoing tensions surrounding protests in the city against mass raids by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
During a Monday night appearance on Fox News show “Hannity,” both host Sean Hannity and Noem criticized California’s so-called “sanctuary” policies which, in general, limits cooperation with federal immigration officials.
Noem charged that ICE agents have been targeting criminals in Los Angeles who are the “worst of the worst” — despite data and reporting showing that the mass arrests that have taken place under President Donald Trump’s administration have included people with no criminal records.
Noem went on to charge that Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass (D) have done “absolutely nothing” about crime in the city.
“Now she’s holding press conferences talking about the fact that people have the right to peacefully protest, and that they’re a city of immigrants,” Noem said about Bass on “Hannity” before she leveled a disparaging dig about Angelenos.
“Well, they’re not a city of immigrants; they’re a city of criminals,” she continued. “Because she has protected them for so many years.”
People in Los Angeles have taken to the streets to protest the Trump administration’s ICE raids in their neighborhoods. Newsom has accused Trump of escalating the situation after he deployed Marines and National Guard troops in California to counter the protests. The president justified his decision to do so — despite objections from Newsom — telling reporters from the Oval Office on Tuesday that he was done playing by the rules.
Newsom has accused the president of wanting to fuel chaos in Los Angeles. The last time a president deployed the National Guard without cooperation from a governor was in 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson sent troops to protect civil rights protesters.
People on X, formerly Twitter, slammed Noem’s comments about Los Angeles, the second largest city in the country, which has rich cultural diversity. Many called her comments “dehumanizing.”
Speaking about Noem’s comments on “Hannity,” Collin Anderson, a clinical assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University at Buffalo College of Arts and Sciences, said that it’s “always concerning to hear a high-ranking federal employee paint entire swathes of the country with a broad brush.”
He emphasized that it’s important to remember that “federal employees are public servants who are supposed to serve the people.”
Noem calling Los Angeles “a city of criminals” is a tactic — and it’s dangerous.
Anderson said that Noem’s comments that Los Angeles is “a city of criminals” is an attempt to “paint the situation in LA as quite dire.”
He said that if news reports suggest that “all of LA is burning,” and the city is “brimming with criminals,” then people “will be more likely to support harsher measures to bring what they perceive to be as out of control violence” — even though, he said, people participating in the protests “represent only a fraction of a percentage of the population” of the city, and that the demonstrations are confined to “a geographic area of a few square miles.”
And Anderson said that baselessly describing people as criminals — people who “for the most part have not gone through due process to determine their criminality or not” is meant to cast them as being in an “out-group” — a “group that isn’t part of ‘proper’ society.”
“Dehumanizing language is dangerous, and society must always be vigilant about it, lest we repeat the horrors of the past,” he said. “The last thing to remember in all of this [is] rights are either for everyone, or they are for no one.”
“If someone else’s rights are being violated, your rights can be too,” he continued.
Jaime Dominguez, a political scientist and associate professor of Instruction at Northwestern University Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences, said that Noem’s comments about Los Angeles reflect an “overarching theme” within the Trump administration, which is to criminalize immigrants and “seeing immigrants through just this linear lens.”
“And the lens is, of course, that they’re not a citizen, they don’t care about the country, they’re not invested in the country,” he said.
Dominguez said that viewing immigrants this way gives Noem and other members of the Trump administration the “leverage to basically target immigrants” and to push a narrative that they’re “not invested in our country.”
He emphasized that this strategy from the current administration is dangerous.
“Once you dehumanize the immigrant in the eyes of the public, then the public will become immune and desensitized to what we see happening on the street,” he said, before later adding: “It’s out of the playbook of authoritarian figures.”
Dominguez also stressed that Trump’s decision to send troops to Los Angeles is part of his tactic to create “chaos” and “disorder” — and to make it seem as though he’s the one fixing it.
It’s part of Trump’s “DNA,” he said.