Kristi Noem Wants to Turn Immigration Into a Twisted Game Show

The Department of Homeland Security is considering a barbaric pitch for a television show where immigrants compete for U.S. citizenship.

The Daily Mail reported Thursday that it had obtained a 35-page program pitch for a show called The American, created by writer and producer Rob Worsoff of Duck Dynasty.

The structure of the show reportedly involves immigrants arriving at Ellis Island aboard “The Citizen Ship” before travelling from state to state aboard a train called “The American,” learning about the United States and participating in competitions themed around the different regions of the U.S. Scores would be rendered by U.S. immigration officials, and losers would be sent home with patently American prizes, such as a Starbucks gift card.

“We’ll join in the laughter, tears, frustration, and joy—hearing their backstories—as we are reminded how amazing it is to be American,” the pitch stated. Nothing could possibly devalue U.S. citizenship more.

Although the Daily Mail reported sources had indicated that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem supported the project, Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin denied Noem’s involvement in the show.

In a post on X Thursday, McLaughlin wrote that the reporting was “completely false” and an “affront to journalism.”

“Secretary Noem has not ‘backed’ or even aware of the pitch of any scripted or reality show,” she said.

McLaughlin said that DHS received hundreds of pitches for television shows a year. “This pitch has not received approval or denial by staff,” she wrote.

Noem’s no stranger to made-for-television propaganda stunts. The former governor of South Dakota was excoriated earlier this week for playing “dress-up” while deporting U.S. citizens and documented immigrants. In March, she posed with a fresh blow out in front of massive cells of prisoners at CECOT, the notorious prison in El Salvador where Donald Trump had exiled 238 Venezuelan immigrants the government alleged were gang members. On Wednesday, Noem refused to even look at a photo of one of the men remanded there.

Supreme Court justices on both sides of the ideological spectrum dismantled the Trump administration’s birthright citizenship arguments, so the president, in turn, accused the nation’s highest judiciary of being gamed by his political opponents.

“The Radical Left SleazeBags, which has no cards remaining in its illegal bag of tricks, is, in a very coordinated manner, PLAYING THE REF with regard to the United States Supreme Court,” Donald Trump posted on Truth Social around midnight Thursday. “They lost the Election in a landslide, and with it, have totally lost their confidence and reason. They are stone cold CRAZY! I hope the Supreme Court doesn’t fall for the games they play. The people are with us in bigger numbers than ever before. They want to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”

Birthright citizenship is baked into the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees citizenship to everyone born or naturalized on U.S. soil. But Trump attempted to end the constitutionally enshrined right mere hours after he was sworn in by signing an executive order stating that children born to immigrants on temporary visas or who are in the country illegally should not be entitled to birthright status. Trump’s order has since been blocked by multiple judges in multiple court circuits.

The Justice Department’s case was an effort by the administration to curb their lower court rulings, hoping to stymy their losses on birthright cases by winning a ruling that judges can only block orders related specifically to the people or areas involved.

The president was apparently still ruminating on it by Friday morning, when he posted on Truth Social that the “SUPREME COURT IS BEING PLAYED BY THE RADICAL LEFT LOSERS, WHO HAVE NO SUPPORT, THE PUBLIC HATES THEM, AND THEIR ONLY HOPE IS THE INTIMIDATION OF THE COURT, ITSELF. WE CAN’T LET THAT HAPPEN TO OUR COUNTRY!”

But both conservative and liberal justices torched the Trump administration’s arguments for ending the program during a Supreme Court hearing Thursday. Justice Elena Kagan questioned why the White House was blatantly ignoring several lower court rulings that the executive order was unconstitutional. Justice Brett Kavanaugh—a Trump appointee—pressed the Justice Department’s lead lawyer into a corner, forcing U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer to admit that the Trump administration didn’t even know how it would actually enforce its birthright citizenship order.

The solicitor general also bewildered Justice Amy Coney Barrett—another Trump appointee—by arguing that Trump has the “right” to disregard legal opinions that he doesn’t personally agree with.

This story has been updated.

It’s time to add yet another instance of blatant insider trading to the Trump administration’s record.

Attorney General Pam Bondi sold between $1 and $5 million of her share in Trump Media on April 2, the same day the president’s “Liberation Day” tariff war announcement broke the stock market, according to reporting from ProPublica. Trump Media stocks specifically fell 13 percent that day.

While it’s hard to confirm exactly what time Bondi sold the stocks, or what she knew beforehand, this type of behavior is par for the course for a president who has been fairly careless about conflict of interest when it comes to his relentless stock market manipulation. Remember that Trump later posted “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!! DJT” on Truth Social, a mere four hours before announcing a 90-day pause on most retaliatory tariffs except for China, an announcement that caused the market to shoot up into the green.

Insider trading is a blatantly illegal practice that involves using special or private information to give yourself or your friends a market advantage. Someone with knowledge of a major economic policy change that would cause the markets to shoot back up would sell their stocks if they knew a huge drop was coming, which is likely exactly what Bondi did in this situation—a classic pump and dump.

Bondi’s Justice Department has yet to comment.

The “big beautiful bill” that Donald Trump demanded from Republicans in Congress is facing opposition from Republicans in the House. 

Since the GOP released a draft budget bill earlier this week with devastating cuts to Medicaid and several other government programs, House Speaker Mike Johnson has had a difficult time selling the bill to the rest of his caucus. The bill is going through the reconciliation process to ensure that it can pass with only a simple majority in both the House and Senate, but even that may be a tall order. 

One House Republican left a party meeting about reconciliation Thursday and was not confident about the bill’s chances. 

“We’re cooked. Speaker let this get out of control,” the representative reportedly texted journalist Jake Sherman. 

Republican Representative Glenn Grothman, a member of the budget committee, criticized the bill Thursday for not being “sincere” and hasn’t disclosed how he will vote when the committee meets tomorrow, saying that he plans to tell the committee chair first. Other Republicans on the committee, including Representatives Ralph Norman and Chip Roy, are reportedly voting “no,” and Representative Andrew Clyde is possibly voting “no” as well. 

The bill also has drawn criticism from Representative Mike Lawler and four other Republicans over its $30,000 cap on state and local tax, or SALT, deductions. Lawler narrowly won reelection in 2024 in a battleground New York district that Vice President Kamala Harris carried, and supports higher deductions due to tax rates in New York.  

Other Republicans, such as Roy and Senator Mike Lee, don’t like the bill’s proposed Medicaid cuts because they feel they don’t go far enough, while 12 GOP representatives wrote a letter to Johnson earlier this month warning that they would “not support a final reconciliation bill that includes any reduction in Medicaid coverage for vulnerable populations.” 

None of this includes Democratic lawmakers’ opposition to the bill, which would necessitate near-unanimous support from the GOP. But with so many Republicans publicly expressing their problems, this budget bill may soon be a big beautiful corpse.

The largest organization devoted to survivors of sexual abuse is caving to Donald Trump and dropping support for immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, and other marginalized groups, out of fear of losing federal funding. 

The Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, or RAINN, has directed staff at its crisis hotline not to direct callers to resources that would violate the White House’s executive orders against diversity, equity, and inclusion, The New York Times reports. 

A list of organizations that staffers are authorized to refer callers to has been stripped of specialized mental health hotlines for gay and transgender people; the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, a group that educates students about sex-based discrimination; and books about male-on-male or female-on-female sexual violence. The changes went into effect three months ago, a RAINN spokesperson told the Times.  

RAINN operates the National Sexual Assault Hotline, one of the country’s largest crisis hotlines for survivors of sexual violence, which served 460,000 people in 2024. It also operates a federally funded hotline for military service members. The move to drop support for resources to help immigrants and LGBTQ+ people, groups that are at particular risk of facing sexual violence, has not gone over well with RAINN’s volunteers. 

In February, a group of those volunteers signed a letter urging the organization’s leaders to restore the prohibited resources, and sent another letter to RAINN’s board of directors sharing their concerns. In the second letter, the volunteers wrote, “When trans, queer, Black, brown, Asian and undocumented survivors come to the hotline in crisis, we are not allowed to provide them with the same level of supportive care as other survivors.”

“RAINN may face uncertain risks in the future if we stand by marginalized survivors, but we are certain to lose our values now if we do not stand with them today,” the letter stated. 

RAINN’s actions show how easily one of the largest resources can be intimidated by the Trump administration. Trump in his second term has sought to punish organizations and institutions that defy his executive orders, by withdrawing federal funding, and now RAINN has joined the ranks of Columbia University and others who have complied. In the process, the most marginalized and vulnerable Americans have lost support in combating sexual abuse.