During a press conference at a new immigrant detention center in the Florida Everglades, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem used her remarks to share a strange and graphic story about a cannibal who was being deported.
The Daily Beast reported Tuesday that while visiting the facility — dubbed "Alligator Alcatraz" — alongside President Donald Trump, Noem defended the new detention facility as necessary in order to remove criminals from the United States. As a way of illustrating the character of the people the Trump administration says it's focused on deporting, the DHS secretary recounted one deportation flight in which a man allegedly engaged in cannibalism — on himself.
"We are going after murderers and rapists and traffickers and drug dealers and getting them off the streets and getting them out of this country because [former President] Joe Biden let the worst of the worst to come in here," Noem said. "The other day, I was talking to some marshals that had been partnering with [Immigration and Customs Enforcement]. They said that they 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. And they had to get him off and get him medical attention."
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"These are the kind of deranged individuals that are on our streets in America that we're trying to target and get out of our country, because they are so deranged they don't belong here," she added.
Noem's claim about the alleged cannibal on the deportation flight has yet to be verified, but some of the more recent immigration arrests cast doubt on the administration's narrative that they're exclusively targeting "the worst of the worst." One 64 year-old Iranian woman who was recently arrested while gardening at her home in New Orleans, Louisiana by plainclothes agents had been in the U.S. for 47 years and had no criminal record.
Last month in Culver City, California, federal agents arrested local vendor Ambrocio Lozano, who was known for selling ice cream out of a cart for roughly two decades to the local community. Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove said Lozano was "snatched, kidnapped, by folks masked in unmarked cars with no warrants."
The "Alligator Alcatraz" facility in South Florida is expected to hold up to 5,000 people at one time, on an abandoned airfield in the middle of swampland surrounded by alligators and dangerous snakes. Trump quipped that immigrants running from alligators shouldn't "run in a straight line."
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Watch the video of Noem's comments below, or by clicking this link.