Why Won't ICE Comment on Kristi Noem's Cannibal Stories?

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has repeatedly claimed that the U.S. government deported a cannibal that “ate other people” and then, while on a flight from the U.S., became so “deranged” that he began to “eat himself.”

Noem first shared the dubious tale late last week during an interview with Fox News’s Jesse Watters. The Cabinet secretary said that a U.S. marshal “off-handedly” told her about a cannibal on a “planeload of illegals.” When Noem asked, “What do you mean he was a cannibal?” the marshal replied: “He started to eat his own arms.” 

Watters probed further. “Was this bad hombre handcuffed to something and he was trying to chew his arm off so he could escape, or was he just hungry?” he asked. “You know, what bothered me the most is that this U.S. Marshal just said it like it was normal,” Noem replied, adding, “He said he was literally eating his own arms. That is what he did. He called himself a cannibal and ate other people and ate himself that day.”

Noem repeated the story on Tuesday as she and President Donald Trump toured a migrant detention facility in the Florida Everglades, officially named “Alligator Alcatraz,” that will house up to 5,000 people and cost around $450 million a year to run.

“The other day, I was talking to some marshals that have been partnering with ICE,” she said, referring to 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.” 

As Trump nodded along, Noem continued: “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.”

Noem did not reply to repeated requests by The Intercept for further information about the alleged incident and the supposed cannibal immigrant.

Cannibals — real and imagined — have been the source of fear and lurid fascination for Westerners stretching back to at least the 15th century, when Christopher Columbus kicked off the colonization of the Americas. Panic over supposed subhuman, barbarous savages helped to justify all manner of racism, violence, exclusion, assimilation, territorial expansion, and conquest. These weaponized racial myths are baked into colonial rhetoric and foundational to Western bigotry.

Despite issuing an endless stream of sensational press releases about deportations and crimes by immigrants, ICE has not referenced the cannibal immigrant deportee mentioned by Noem in any of its reports. 

Requests for additional information sent to ICE and the Department of Homeland Security went unanswered.

Unhinged claims of cannibalism have become a theme in the Trump orbit.

In March 2024, tech billionaire and future Trump White House adviser Elon Musk and other right-wing pundits advanced claims of Haitians and Haitian immigrants as cannibals. Right-wing gadfly Ian Miles Cheong, posted on X about “cannibal gangs in Haiti who abduct and eat people,” adding: “Reminder that these people are now illegally entering the US en masse.” Musk also referred to “cannibal gangs” and amplified warnings about a possible invasion of the U.S. by them. When he was called out for smearing Haitians, Musk responded: “If wanting to screen immigrants for potential homicidal tendencies and cannibalism makes me ‘right wing,’ then I would gladly accept such a label!”

Marlene Daut, a Yale University professor of French and African diaspora studies, told NBC at the time that Western powers began spreading baseless tales of cannibalism in Haiti after the country’s slaves overthrew French colonizers in 1804. “It is very disturbing that Elon Musk would repeat these absurdities that do, indeed, have a long history,” she explained.

Later that same year, Trump repeated fictitious stories about Haitian immigrants eating pets in a small city in Ohio. “In Springfield, they are eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats. They are eating the pets of the people that live there,” Trump said during a presidential debate. Musk and Trump’s vice presidential pick, JD Vance, also advanced the misinformation.

The QAnon conspiracy movement of Trump’s first term, which cast the president as a savior, also rested on outlandish theories of people-eating. In the QAnon view, Democratic politicians and celebrities — from Hillary Clinton to Oprah Winfrey — were Satan-worshipping, pedophile cannibals. “Well, I don’t know much about the movement other than I understand they like me very much, which I appreciate,” Trump said of QAnon back in 2020.

The fictional serial killer and cannibal Hannibal Lecter also seems to permanently live in Trump’s mind. During his most recent presidential campaign, Trump frequently mentioned the fictional character during rants about immigration at rallies. In his rambling, free-associative style, Trump connected Lecter with the imaginary threat of unspecified Latin American countries emptying their prisons and mental institutions and sending the inmates to the United States.

“People are pouring across the border now, disease-ridden people,” he told a crowd in Erie, Pennsylvania, in July 2023. “And I said it, I said it over and over: people from mental institutions, from insane asylums. That’s like ‘Silence of the Lambs’ stuff. But they’re coming into our country.”

Trump often added more, often confused and confusing, details, appearing to misremember the movie. “Silence of the Lamb! Has anyone ever seen ‘The Silence of the Lambs’? The late, great Hannibal Lecter is a wonderful man. He oftentimes would have a friend for dinner. Remember the last scene? Excuse me, I’m about to have a friend for dinner as this poor doctor walked by. I’m about to have a friend for dinner,” Trump rambled last May in Wildwood, New Jersey. “But Hannibal Lecter. Congratulations. The late, great Hannibal Lecter. We have people that are being released into our country that we don’t want in our country.”

In March, now in the White House, Trump continued to invoke Lecter’s name, claiming that Lecter was real, or rather that real-life Lecters had crossed the border, or that he had stopped them from crossing the border, or something. “They used to go crazy when I talked about — when I talk about Hannibal Lecter. The late great Hannibal Lecter, right? The fake news would say, ‘Why does he talk about that? He’s a fictional character.’ He’s not. We have many of them that came across the border. He’s actually not,” he said, before possibly referring to himself in the third person. “But when the people went to the voting booth, then we understood why he talked about that because they voted for us. They say, ‘We don’t want Hannibal Lecter in our country.’”

The Intercept could find no independent evidence of the self-cannibalizing immigrant cannibal referenced by Noem.

She has, however, been caught lying in the past. In her 2024 memoir, “No Going Back,” Noem described instances involving international leaders that were called into question, including meeting North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and canceling a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron. After the alleged incidents came under scrutiny, a Noem spokesperson referred to the claims as “two small errors” that would be “corrected.” (The book previously came to prominence for her account of her brazen killing of her own puppy, Cricket.)

Earlier this month, Noem was called out for lying about the Secret Service manhandling Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., while she was giving a press conference. “This man burst into the room, started lunging towards the podium, interrupting me and elevating his voice and was stopped. Did not identify himself,” Noem told Fox News, noting that “nobody knew who he was.” However, video footage clearly shows Padilla identifying himself before Secret Service agents force him out of the room, wrestle him to the ground, and handcuff him. In one of the videos, Padilla could be heard shouting: “I’m Sen. Alex Padilla. I have questions for the secretary.”

Noem also has a questionable record of financial truth-telling. While serving as governor of South Dakota, Noem received $80,000 from an anonymous donor but later failed to declare it, according to a new report by ProPublica. After becoming head of Homeland Security, she released a detailed accounting of her assets and sources of income from 2023 on but still failed to mention the money. Experts have called this a likely violation of federal ethics requirements.

Trump’s lies, for his part, are legion. The Washington Post counted more than 30,000 during his first term in office. The relentless dishonesty has continued during his second term.

In addition to his dehumanizing cannibalism rhetoric, the president also espouses discredited notions of genetic criminality. During last year’s presidential campaign, he said 13,000 “murderers” had crossed into the United States through an “open border.” He said that, for murderers, “it’s in their genes. And we’ve got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”

The “born criminal” theory, pioneered by Italian physician and criminologist Cesare Lombroso in the 1870s, was rooted in racism and cast Africans, Indigenous Americans, Roma, southern Italians, and others as “primitive” humans “not of our species but the species of bloodthirsty beasts.” The ideas, which eventually fell out of favor around the world, were embraced in eugenics-obsessed Nazi Germany.

Trump has long espoused the same line of thinking. “You have good genes, you know that, right?” Trump said during a 2020 campaign rally. “You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe? The racehorse theory,” he said.

The twin fantasies of criminal genetics and lurid cannibal stories, if one makes the mistake of believing them, can lead down some strange paths.

In 2017, the Daily Mirror reported that Trump could be related to Peter Stumpf, a 16th-century cannibal serial killer nicknamed the “Werewolf of Bedburg.”

Stumpf, a farmer in the city of Bedburg, near Cologne in what is now Germany, was convicted of murdering at least 13 children — including his own son — and two pregnant women before devouring parts of their corpses. He was executed in 1589, reportedly alongside his lover Katharina Trump, who was found guilty of aiding the killer cannibal.

The Stumpf story became infamous in 16th-century England thanks to a popular pamphlet — a precursor of the sensationalist British tabloids, like the Daily Mirror, that mix stories of celebrity affairs with headlines of decapitation threats, stabbings, and horrific accidents.

Kevin Pittle, an anthropologist at Biola University in Southern California, told the Daily Mirror that records were incomplete and inconclusive. “What I did stumble across, was people working on Donald Trump’s genealogy — and there were several Katharinas early on,” he said. “We’re investigating — is it possible that the Katharina Trump named in the werewolf narrative — is it the same Katharina Trump that Donald is descended from? There’s no way to support it at the moment,” Pittle admitted. “But is it entertaining to consider? Yes.”

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