Mother Jones illustration; Angelina Katsanis/AP, Alex Brandon/AP
As quickly as condemnation poured in over the forcible removal of Sen. Alex Padilla from a Department of Homeland Security press conference on Thursday, the right appeared to identify a different victim.
Kristi Noem, who, in her characteristic makeup and baseball cap, had been delivering a speech defending the president’s deployment of the military in Los Angeles, when Padilla, a Latino man and elected official, started to approach the podium. He is heard, despite what DHS falsely claimed after the incident, stating his identity. Still, at least four men are seen quickly pouncing on Padilla, shoving him out the door, while Noem continued with her prepared remarks.
But to the right, Noem was the wrong party. For them, the incident seems to have transformed her into something of a wounded dove by the incident. “She’s like the most delicate, beautiful, tiny woman,” Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) said during an appearance on Benny Johnson’s podcast. She also took a shot at Padilla’s manhood. “What actual testosterone dude goes in and tries to break Kristi Noem?”
Break Noem? Padilla may have been there to call out cruelty. But the senior senator from California was not there to break anyone. That a woman who sits atop an agency ruthlessly profiling and deporting immigrants, and in some cases, sending them to a Salvadoran gulag with no due process, is suddenly unable to be confronted by an elected official without them being physically assaulted is risible. Yet, Noem’s rise to power has long seemed to rely on this intentional contradiction: perfectly styled hair while deriding caged immigrants in the background; heavily caked makeup while tagging along for made-for-TV immigration raids; tough on crime but “delicate, beautiful, tiny.” As I wrote in a recent piece, it is the push for regressive gender roles by an increasingly fascist administration.
But conservative gender norms have nothing on the glaring racism in the suggestion that Noem, a white woman, is the victim after a Latino man is physically dragged out of a room by multiple Secret Service agents. The pretext of criminality attached to people who are not white pervades this administration. Just this week, Rep. LaMonica McIver, a Black congresswoman from New Jersey, was indicted on charges of impeding and interfering with law enforcement officials after protesting at an ICE facility last month. The charges, which carry a maximum of 17 years in prison, come despite shifting explanations from the Trump administration about what led to McIver’s arrest. McIver has condemned the charges as politically motivated; as the New York Times reported, far-right groups have since targeted McIver with intense racism online.
Both incidents, Noem’s press conference and McIver’s arrest, underscore with acute clarity the racist themes that animate this administration. In these early days of our fascist slide, it is painfully clear who gets to be “delicate, beautiful, and tiny,” and who is seen as a violent threat to law enforcement.