Kristi ‘ICE Barbie’ Noem rankled senior Coast Guard officials by urging the force to divert resources from an active search-and-rescue mission to one designed to deport migrants, according to insiders.
The Coast Guard was trying to find a missing service member, Seaman Bryan K. Lee, 23, from California, who “was reported unaccounted for” on Tuesday morning, Feb. 4 last year, just nine days after Noem was confirmed as Homeland Security secretary.
The force had been using a C-130 military transport aircraft in the search. The same plane was supposed to be enforcing President Trump’s scorched-earth anti-immigration campaign by ferrying detained migrants from California to Texas.
So, Noem verbally ordered it be pulled from the Pacific search, two U.S. officials and a Coast Guard official told NBC News. They said she commanded the Acting Commandant of the Coast Guard, Admiral Kevin Lunday, to redirect the aircraft so that it could fulfill its “Alien Expulsion Operations.”
After Lunday reportedly notified the National Command Center of the redirection and the pilots of the C-130 were told to fly to San Diego, the regional Coast Guard command in San Diego is said to have pushed back. It tried to find other aircraft for the “Alien Expulsion Operations” so the C-130 wouldn’t have to be pulled from the search for Lee, who was never found.
Two available C-27s were found to fly the migrants to Texas, and the C-130 continued in the Pacific. A DHS spokesperson told NBC, “The C-130 never left the search” and denied that Noem had ever issued instructions to divert the aircraft, chalking the claims up to a “deep state effort” against Trump.
But Noem’s reported interference frustrated Coast Guard top brass with its pivot to Trump’s immigration agenda and shift away from normal operations.
“The primary mission was search-and-rescue,” the former Coast Guard official told NBC News. “And now the number one stated mission of the Coast Guard is border security, that is a cultural change that the culture hasn’t quite caught up to.”
They described the morale under Noem as “terrible.”
The DHS spokesperson disagreed and said, “That’s armchair speculation that’s out of touch with the reality in the service right now.”
Under Noem, more than 750 Coast Guard flights have been diverted from routine missions—like maritime patrols and search-and-rescue—to transport detained migrants to deportation hubs, according to ICE Flight Monitor. The number of migrant-carrying Coast Guard flights surged from 14 in June to 149 by November last year, the group reported.
DHS has been contacted for further comment.
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