Noem makes another visit to Texas-Mexico border

Gov. Kristi Noem tours the Texas-Mexico border on Jan. 26, 2024.

Gov. Kristi Noem made another visit to the Texas-Mexico border Friday, which she described as a “warzone.”

Noem’s office did not respond to South Dakota Searchlight questions about how she got to Texas and who paid for the trip. South Dakota’s capital city, Pierre, is 1,200 miles from the Texas-Mexico border.

The trip came on the heels of a statement Noem signed earlier in the week with 24 other Republican governors. The statement expressed support for actions taken at the border by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.

The trigger for the letter was a U.S. Supreme Court decision earlier in the week, when the court sided with the Biden administration. The court ruled that federal Border Patrol agents may cut the Texas National Guard’s concertina wire, which blocks federal agents from accessing a portion of the border.

Noem discussed the decision and the governors’ statement this week on Fox News.

“Governor Abbott has done the exact right thing, and I’ll drive him more razor wire from South Dakota if I have to, for him to do his job,” Noem said.

In the statement, the governors said they “stand in solidarity with our fellow Governor, Greg Abbott, and the State of Texas in utilizing every tool and strategy, including razor wire fences, to secure the border.”

Noem also visited the Texas-Mexico border last year, when she spent $850,000 from South Dakota’s Emergency and Disaster Fund to send 50 South Dakota National Guard soldiers to support Texas border-control efforts.

In 2021, she accepted a $1 million donation from Tennessee billionaire Willis Johnson to pay most of the cost for deploying 48 South Dakota National Guard troops to the border. That deployment cost a total of $1.45 million, according to records obtained by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. The $1 million donation was routed through South Dakota’s Emergency and Disaster Fund, and the fund itself covered the portion of the deployment’s cost not covered by the donation.

Meanwhile this week, Noem’s fellow Republican and South Dakotan, U.S. Sen. John Thune, was trying to negotiate an immigration policy deal in Washington, D.C.

Thune, the No. 2 Senate Republican, and other top Senate negotiators said Thursday that final details remained under debate, despite outside pressure from GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump to sink any agreement as he makes immigration one of his central campaign messages.

Thune said negotiations on an immigration deal tied to the passage of a multi-billion-dollar global securities supplemental package are at “a critical moment, and we’ve got to drive hard to get this done.”

“If we can’t get there, then we’ll go to Plan B,” Thune said.

He did not go into details on what a “Plan B” would look like or if a deal on immigration would be removed from the supplemental, which would provide critical aid to Ukraine that some Republican and Democratic senators are advocating as that country runs low on ammunition in its war with Russia.

While no framework or bill text of a Senate deal has been released, some of the proposals put forth would curb the Biden administration’s use of parole authority, which the administration has heavily relied on to grant temporary protections to migrants by allowing them to live and work in the United States without visas.

— States Newsroom’s D.C. Bureau contributed to this report.

This article originally appeared on Sioux Falls Argus Leader: Noem makes another visit to Texas-Mexico border