Kristi Noem Gave Huge Contract to Company Accused of People Smuggling

Outgoing Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem awarded a contract for a border wall to a company that smuggled workers into the country, supplied them with weapons and ignored them when they were involved in a shooting.

The daily beast reports that Texas-based SLSCO Ltd. has two contracts with DHS worth a total of $1 billion to build the border wall in Laredo and Del Rio, Texas. Noem personally approved the contracts. The company also signed a contract to build the “Alligator Alcatraz” detention center in Florida, and under the first Trump administration it won bids worth nearly $2 billion to build the border wall.

But SLSCO, a major Republican donor, was accused in court of smuggling Mexican nationals into the country as workers, then giving them guns to work as guards. Two of the company’s former security officers, a former FBI special agent and a former San Diego sheriff’s deputy, filed a lawsuit against SLSCO for “trafficking humans and weapons” across the U.S. border with Mexico.

The lawsuit says the two men began working for the company in 2019 and discovered migrants working illegally for SLSCO at border wall sites in Southern California, as well as armed Mexican nationals working as guards. In July of the same year, these guards allegedly had an exchange of fire with another group of migrants who attempted to steal from the SLSCO construction sites.

But after the two contractors raised the issue with their superiors, nothing happened. The former FBI agent then informed the bureau of the smuggling and the shooting, and shortly afterward, both contractors were fired, which they said was retaliation. But the lawsuit never made it to court because both plaintiffs voluntarily dropped the case. SLSCO never appears to have made any public comments on the matter, according to The Daily Beast.

It’s yet another black mark on Noem’s disastrous tenure at DHS. The agency shot and killed two American citizens in Minneapolis on her watch as she implemented the Trump administration’s program of mass and violent deportations. Noem was also criticized for hiring an eight-day-old company for a $220 million advertising campaign for ICE, spending millions to luxury jetsand buy 2,500 trucks for ICE that the agency can’t even use, among many others misdeeds. What other ill-advised purchases has she forced on taxpayers?