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Some days the show is a prison drama: A mass of prisoners assemble under the watch of an authority. Some days it’s a police procedural: Protagonists in uniform conduct raids on dark city streets. Some days it’s a western: A figure in a cowboy hat patrols on horseback, keeping an eye on the wild frontier.
The show has many forms, but it is all one production — the social-media feed of the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem. Since she took office in January, the secretary’s online video presence has been helping a media-minded administration broadcast images of unsparing domination with a telegenic face.
Ms. Noem’s social feed drew wide notice last week when she posted a 33-second video from a Salvadoran prison where the administration has been sending detainees. Dressed in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement cap and active-wear, a $50,000 Rolex watch on her wrist, she warns that “if you come to our country illegally, this is one of the consequences you could face.”
The figures behind Ms. Noem are not so neatly or expensively styled but they also convey an aesthetic message. The men, many of them shirtless, are crowded, teeming, sitting and standing, seemingly at attention, to face the camera from behind bars. Ms. Noem, the image says, is literally standing between them and you. They are objects, warnings, a forbidding wallpaper of fear and subjugation.
The secretary’s videos take care to make her look the part, dress the part and play the part against scenic backdrops. Long one of the G.O.P.’s most camera-ready stars as governor of South Dakota, she changed her manner and even her look as the MAGA movement took over the party.
Now, as the face of its immigration-enforcement project, she wears and is framed by accouterments of inviolable authority. She goes out with ICE, wearing a police vest and declaring, like Andy Sipowicz in “NYPD Blue,” “We are getting the dirt bags off these streets.” She dons a U.S. Customs and Border Protection hat and jacket in a post announcing “America is CLOSED to law breakers.”
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