Lock your dogs up, because Kristi Noem is back.

Two people familiar with the deliberations currently taking place Mar-a-Lago told CNN on Tuesday the South Dakota governor will serve as Secretary of Homeland Security in Donald Trump‘s next government.

Noem will be joined by two other anti-immigration agitators — former ICE chief Tom Homan and alleged white supremacist Stephen Miller — who hold senior positions within the department.

It’s something of a return from the cold for the South Dakota rancher and rancher after she admitted in an autobiography published earlier this year that she once had a killed a family dog saw her sidelined from the Republican shortlist for Trump’s running mate.

To be fair, she’s not the only right-wing figure recently singled out for a penchant for animal cruelty. There’s also Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, who is too accused that he had once consigned his neighbor’s dog to a similar fate, and the revelations about new NRA chief Doug Hamlin’s role in the 1980 torture of a student cat.

It’s not the only bizarre claim from her 2024 memoir, either No returnwith a fairly unhinged crusade against seat belts and a passage implying that she allowed motorcycle gangs to break COVID-19 laws in South Dakota as an F-you to the “nanny state.”

Oh, and that’s all before you even talk about one apocryphal encounter with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un that we, um… have yet to hear of any actual evidence taking place.

Whatever her flair for autofiction, there’s little doubt that Noem’s anti-immigration credentials make her a natural choice for Trump as Secretary of Homeland Security. She strongly supported the Republican president’s “Muslim ban” and has tried to block the Biden administration from housing undocumented immigrants in South Dakota.

What is perhaps more debatable is that, if at all, she is aware of the irony of her appointment as a judge on who does not and should not enter the country.

That’s like a governor who, lest we forget, currently has no access to tribal areas in her home state after making baseless claims in January that South Dakota’s reservations are facilitating an “invasion” by Mexican drug cartels.

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