As secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem has become one of the most visible leaders of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation and detention push. According to officials, the role has caused Noem and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents who operate under her authority to face threats that have led them to adopt masks and necessitated an unusual living arrangement for the secretary. However, on Facebook, Noem appears to be far less secure.
TPM has identified a page that seems to belong to Noem and was updated publicly through 2023. It is hidden in relatively plain sight and uses a thinly veiled alias for Noem’s name. On that page, Noem seems to have fallen for an internet hoax and connected with family members who have shared extensive and identifiable personal information while also participating in at least one commercial promotion for a South Dakota escape room with the secretary.
While the public material on the page that appears to belong to Noem is largely typical Facebook fare, it is unusual and notable given her unique position. Experts who spoke to TPM described the situation as “inadvisable” and “sloppy” for one of the top security officials in the country.
A former senior government official who requested anonymity to talk about the issue with TPM called it a risk for “basic operational security” and noted figures like Noem who are under Secret Service protection are generally counseled to avoid having this type of personal social media activity publicly accessible.
“I’m surprised to hear that,” the official said when we informed them about the Facebook page that appears to belong to Noem. “Protective measures include advising principals on basic operational security, keeping a low profile, and things of that nature.”
In an email to TPM, DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin said the Facebook page “was a defunct administrative account that hasn’t been used for years.” When asked how the page, which was used to post personal photos and share videos, served an administrative function or whether DHS had any comment on the account’s content, McLaughlin simply doubled down.
“I’ll reiterate as i did before that this is an administrative, no personal, account,” McLaughlin wrote.
There are several clear indications that connect the page to Noem. It is “friends” with pages belonging to several members of Noem’s family who use their real names and who have publicly used those accounts to promote their professional and political endeavors, including campaigning for Noem when she ran for her second term as governor of South Dakota in 2022. Some of the pages belonging to Noem’s family members that are friends with the profile posted pictures from inside the White House earlier this year and have been linked to by Noem’s official, verified page on the site, providing further confirmation of their identities.
While the use of an alias would ostensibly offer Noem some privacy and distance from the account’s content, the former official suggested the measure was insufficient. They noted TPM was able to uncover the page despite the apparent use of an alias.
“Quote unquote ‘secret’ Facebook posting is not a reasonable mitigation measure, because there are people out there, adversaries, that can easily figure it out,” the former official said. “I mean, you are an investigative reporter and figured it out.”
All of the information referred to in this story that was posted by Noem’s family members and the not-so-secret account on Facebook appears to be public for most users of the social media platform. TPM is not “friends” with any of the pages belonging to Noem’s family or with the account. The content described in this story was all visible without any such connection.
The alias account’s last publicly viewable post came on August 16, 2023, which was while Noem was governor. However, the page has remained online and visible since Noem became Trump’s DHS secretary earlier this year. In that last post, the alias account shared a missive declaring “parents, let your daughters grow up to be horse girls” that came from another account that is billed as an “Uplifting page for people that Love God and the Country way of life.”
TPM is not identifying the online alias used by Noem, or naming her family members, in order to preserve their privacy. We are also refraining from directly linking to these pages because experts have suggested some of the content posted by the secretary’s relatives — including names and photos of her children, grandchildren, and home addresses that are associated with Noem in public records — could pose a specific security risk. The alias account has also posted private photos that seem to show Noem and her family members.
In the past, even seemingly basic personal information has been used to compromise public officials. In 2008, Sarah Palin’s email was hacked when she was serving as governor of Alaska and the Republican candidate for vice president. Experts noted the hacker was able to break into her email using simple biographical facts that gave answers to Palin’s security questions. These types of concerns would seem particularly important for Noem since her own department has described her as having been “horribly doxxed and targeted.”
A former C-Suite cybersecurity executive in Silicon Valley, who requested anonymity, told TPM that any personal page belonging to Noem should have been “cleaned up” when she joined Trump’s Cabinet earlier this year.
“As somebody who ran executive protection teams, you would tell a CEO to keep all of your social media including Facebook profiles private,” the former cybersecurity executive said. “At least when she became governor, but definitely when she became Homeland Security secretary, this is the kind of thing that should have been cleaned up. And Facebook makes that incredibly easy, actually. There’s a very simple flow you can go through that will set all of your previous posts private. She could have run that and made all of this disappear from the public view.”
The former government official who spoke with TPM noted that posting some of the content that appears on these pages is specifically discouraged for top officials and their families.
“The Secret Service obviously provides her protection as they do for other Cabinet officials, the president, et cetera,” the former senior official said. “Part of providing executive protection — in this case having close protection, she has a detail that accompanies her — is also advising the principal on how to protect their identity, what things should not be posted. That includes some of the things you mentioned like addresses and pictures of children.”
According to the former senior official, the protection typically afforded to people at Noem’s level can include “training” with advice for relatives “because family members could be leveraged by an adversary, potentially.”
While her family members have posted Facebook content linking themselves and the hidden account to Noem, there are also other things on that page that tie it to the secretary. The alias account has posted casual photos that appear to show Noem, her children, and her grandchildren. The account identifies its user as having graduated from the same educational institutions as Noem; Hamlin High School and South Dakota State University. On December 1, 2016, which was the day after Noem’s birthday, the account posted a message declaring, “Thank you everyone for all the birthday blessings! It was a good day.” And, in April 2020, the alias wrote, “Ok I need grandkids.” One of Noem’s daughters commented below that post and tagged her sister and brother-in-law, who were married the prior year.
“I feel like this was directed towards you,” she wrote.
Apart from personal information that could pose an operational security risk, the publicly viewable content on the alias Facebook page is largely innocuous. The user posted videos of church sermons and Christian content, including one article that warned parents “your children do not deserve privacy” online.
“Stalk them. Know everything they’re texting. Know everything they are posting. Know everything they are receiving. Know everything that’s being posted about them. Follow them on social media. Follow their friends. BE IN THE KNOW,” the article said.
The alias account also included a few indications that the user behind it has had trouble with the internet and social media. On May 31, 2021, the account seemed to make a typo with a post that contained just a single letter shared to all of its friends: “K.” A few years earlier, there was a post confirming the user behind the account was having trouble controlling what was shared. On January 6, 2017, the page shared a whimsical video of “dogs in leotards” from the animal-themed site The Dodo. The user subsequently disavowed their own post.
“Ok sorry guys I didn’t post this. No idea how it got on here…” they wrote.
At the time, Noem was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. One comment from that post provides further indication the page is an online alias for Noem. A friend of hers had a strong reaction to the “dogs in leotards” clip. They responded with Noem’s real name rather than the alias.
“Wow…ok….” they wrote, before adding, “Hi Kristi !!”
On September 2, 2019, nearly eight months after Noem assumed office as governor of South Dakota, the alias account posted about another online issue. Apparently, the user believed only 25 of their friends were “allowed to see my posts” on Facebook. The page shared a string of text that the author believed would solve the issue:
“Here’s how to bypass the system FB now has in place that limits posts on your news feed. Their new algorithm chooses the same few people – about 25 – who will read your posts. Therefore, hold your finger down anywhere in this post and ‘copy’ will pop up. Click ‘copy’. Then go to your page, start a new post, and put your finger anywhere in the blank field. ‘Paste’ will pop up and click ‘paste’. This will bypass the system.
If you are reading this message, do me a favor and leave me a quick comment…a ‘hello,’ a sticker, whatever you want, so you will appear in my newsfeedIt WORKS!! I don’t know how many friends I have. I just want to see all of your posts that I have been missing and not getting! Hello!”
One of the account’s friends responded that the text was a well-known “hoax” that had made the rounds the prior year. They included a link to an article confirming that there was no 25-friend content limit and that the text the alias account posted was a “hoax message” users were unwittingly spreading. The story included a statement from a Facebook representative alluding to how embarrassing it was to be fooled by the shareable scam.
“Friends don’t let friends copy and paste memes, and this one simply is not true,” the Facebook representative said in the article.
Two prominent cybersecurity experts who spoke with TPM independently used the term “sloppy” to describe the accounts linked to Noem on Facebook.
“This is sloppy, but not uncommon and definitely shows a lack of what we normally would expect as professionalism,” said John Sebes in a conversation last week.
While security guru Bruce Schneier also called it “sloppy,” he echoed the notion it wasn’t entirely surprising, particularly from the Trump Cabinet.
“We could say that you’re dumb, you should have done better. I don’t know,” Schneier said, later adding, “She’s in the Trump administration right? You know, what do you expect?”
Schneier also alluded to the fact that ill-advised social media behavior is common outside of Washington.
“I see lots of people who are just sloppy on the internet. Sloppy on the internet is, like, normal,” said Schneier. “I wish people would be better, but people aren’t better.”
The former C-Suite security executive in Silicon Valley also said they weren’t surprised to see Noem having issues with internet security and literacy following her criticism of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and cuts she’s implemented there. According to the executive, Noem’s actions effectively meant “dismantling the most important defensive cybersec agency in the U.S. government.
“It’s not inconsistent with what we know of her. She is dismantling CISA and she has not shown any kind of knowledge of cybersecurity,” the executive said. “So, it is unfortunate that we now have a head of Homeland Security who shows no personal knowledge of cybersecurity.”
Noem also has public, verified Facebook and Instagram pages. While those accounts, which promote Noem’s government activities, do not include candid pictures, memes, and hoaxes, they do have some questionable social media behavior for an official of Noem’s stature.
On June 2, Noem posted about what she described as a “weekend with family and loved ones, and words from the Lord.” The post included the Instagram tag advertising an escape room in Watertown, South Dakota along with a photo of Noem and her daughters smiling next to a woman wearing the business’ merch. Two days earlier, the venue shared that same picture on its own Facebook along with an option to “shop this photo” and purchase the merchandise.
DHS did not respond to specific questions about the escape room posts.
Last year, when she was governor, Noem faced questions over social media posts where she promoted a cosmetic dentistry company. The former senior U.S. official said it was also “inadvisable” for Noem to appear in promotional content for businesses as secretary of DHS. However, they also pointed out that the Trump administration has not always allowed itself to be caught up in traditional ethics concerns.
“That’s where the ethics folks would come into play and say, ‘You don’t want to do that,’” the former senior official said of Noem’s appearance in the monetized escape room post. “But speaking quite candidly, we’ve got the president of the United States selling bitcoin, so a secretary doing a post for a place with t-shirts on is several levels less egregious. It’s still not advisable, I think, because you want to be above reproach.”
The ex-official also noted Noem is operating under a unique spotlight and threat environment. With ICE and DHS playing a leading role in implementing Trump’s mass deportation agenda, Noem’s appearances in full makeup and tactical gear at immigration raids and detention camps have earned her the nickname “ICE Barbie” and even been lampooned on “South Park.”
“History has proven that family members and principals will slip up and make mistakes, that’s why you have protective intelligence and other monitoring,” the former official said. “Clearly, DHS and the border czar are getting a lot of publicity. Every day, there’s something about DHS and Kristi Noem in particular, so folks are watching her very carefully.”
However, the official also noted that, even with the intense attention, Noem may not necessarily be following all the recommendations of those assigned to protect her.
“Folks are advised and, at the end of the day, the principals do what they want to do. In the executive protection arena, principals … have their own mind,” the former official said. “And their family, whether it’s Kristi Noem or another executive, they’re going to do what they want to do at the end of the day — but they have to understand the risk.”
Overall, the former official said Noem should shut down any non-official Facebook page. They also suggested the secretary and her family might want to post less in general.
“It’s smart business for them to tighten all that down,” the former official said. “It really is. For her sake, for her family, and frankly, for the operation not to get her in some way compromised,”
