Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is brushing off a savage takedown by South Park — but not for the reasons you might expect. While the animated show tore into her record, her role in immigration crackdowns, and even her widely criticised dog-killing scandal, Noem decided to zero in on one thing during her response: her animated character’s appearance.
Speaking to Glenn Beck on his podcast, Noem admitted she hadn’t watched the episode but still suggested she was aware of how the show portrayed her. “It never ends. But it’s so lazy to just constantly make fun of women for how they look. It’s always the liberals and extremists [who] do that,” she said. “If they wanted to criticize my job, go ahead and do that, but clearly they can’t. They just pick something petty like that.”
Her defense sparked even more buzz given former President Donald Trump’s long, well-documented history of mocking women for their appearance — using insults like “horseface” and “pig” — something Noem didn’t bring up at all.
But South Park didn’t hold back on the policy critiques either. The episode dragged Noem’s support for aggressive ICE tactics and mocked the agency’s training and recruitment methods. In the storyline, Mr. Mackey loses his job as a school counselor and ends up working for ICE, which sets the stage for a series of ridiculous and wildly exaggerated raids — including one at a live Dora the Explorer show and even one at the gates of heaven.
Noem’s cartoon character isn’t exactly the picture of subtlety. In the episode, she gleefully takes part in the raids and, in a string of shocking scenes, shoots multiple puppies — including Krypto from the latest Superman film and even a service dog. At one point, she stars in a mock ICE recruitment video, proudly declaring, “A few years ago, I had to put my puppy down by shooting it in the face because sometimes doing what’s important means doing what’s hard,” before firing a shot into a dog on the street, reported the Independent. She then adds, “Now we’ll ask the same determination of you because detaining and questioning people is never easy!”
There’s also a running gag about her face constantly sagging or falling off entirely, only to be fixed with a quick hit of botox from an ever-present makeup team. It was savage, over-the-top, and classic South Park, and somehow, all Noem wanted to talk about was how unfair it was to mock her appearance.
Adding another twist, the Department of Homeland Security actually used a South Park promo screenshot earlier in the week for ICE recruitment, seemingly unaware of the takedown that was coming. After the episode aired, the show fired back on X with a post mocking DHS using the White House’s own words: “Wait, so we ARE relevant? #eatabagofdicks”
Noem’s sagging animated face has since become South Park’s current profile picture on X, and if their history says anything, they’re not likely to back down anytime soon.