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A day after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, Kristi Noem, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), was on the fiftieth floor of One World Trade Center, holding a press conference. While posted in front of three uniformed officers standing stock-still like royal guards, Noem trumpeted recent local action by DHS, which oversees ICE: “We are on offense,” she declared, against “scumbags.” Addressing the events in Minneapolis, Noem insisted that the ICE agent who killed Good was acting in self-defense. And she revealed what she believed to be the underlying culprit for Good’s death: “provocative talk” from public officials critical of ICE that was “inciting people to take action and perpetuate violence.” Just to Noem’s right, wearing a blue blazer, was Tricia McLaughlin, DHS’s assistant secretary for public affairs—who has become a master of “provocative talk.”
At the age of thirty-one, McLaughlin oversees all of DHS’s public affairs, including its famously extreme social media channels, and is ubiquitous on television. As the Trump administration’s voice for its expansionist immigration machine, she has become a star in MAGA-world. As one national reporter who has covered DHS told me, “She’s fearless in her own way and completely loyal and shameless. Trump loves that stuff.”
On cable news, McLaughlin has portrayed the US as a country riddled with MS-13 sadists: “They maim, they rape, they kill Americans for sport.” She’s referred to some deportees as “uniquely barbaric.” In an appearance on NewsNation days after Good’s killing, McLaughlin accused Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, of releasing hundreds of “strong-armed rapists,” murderers, and “child pedophiles” out of jails and onto the streets rather than hand them over to ICE. “These leaders allow criminal illegal aliens to walk around with impunity and create more American victims,” she said. “We will not apologize for being on the ground and enforcing the rule of law.”
McLaughlin has a clear model in Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary. But if Leavitt’s signature is outlandishness, McLaughlin’s is total fear mongering. “What Tricia McLaughlin is doing at Homeland Security is unlike anything I’ve ever seen in my government service,” said David Lapan, who spent years in communications roles for the Marine Corps, the Department of Defense, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and then had a brief stint as a DHS spokesperson in the first Trump administration. “I’ve never seen it as adversarial as this.” Her overarching mandate—as stated by Trump himself—is to declare that ICE is arresting the “worst of the worst” despite evidence to the contrary.
One reporter I spoke with had the dispiriting experience of seeing McLaughlin go on national television to denigrate their reporting about data showing that ICE arrests many people who have no criminal history. Most of the journalists I spoke with asked not to be named to avoid getting on DHS’s bad side as they continue to report on immigration. “I don’t want to end up in Alligator Alcatraz,” one joked. (McLaughlin did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
McLaughlin’s profile has grown to such an extent that when politicians speak out against DHS, they routinely address not just Noem but her spokesperson directly. Dan Goldman, a Democratic congressman in New York, released a statement accusing McLaughlin of lying about the facts of the arrest of a New York City Council employee, an immigrant from Venezuela who was taken by ICE after a routine immigration appointment. Goldman said that, contrary to McLaughlin’s statements, the employee was living and working legally in the US and accused McLaughlin of “doing what she does best: gaslighting the American people.” J.B. Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, has said “Tricia McLaughlin should not have the job that she has. She’s a pathological liar.”
Molly O’Toole, who has won a Pulitzer for her immigration reporting for This American Life, told me that under McLaughlin, DHS is “blatantly lying to the American public” in part by “barraging X users with details of operations or ongoing investigations that they claim support their version of events” while “abandoning those claims” in court. According to the Washington Post, what O’Toole has observed is a common pattern: “DHS announces that an arrestee has a criminal record and lists the charges. But the public announcement leaves out that the charges had been reduced or dropped.”
Under McLaughlin, DHS regularly refers to the Trump administration as “the most transparent administration in American history.” And it’s true that, when compared with DHS under the Biden administration—which O’Toole criticizes for actively practicing a “strategy of public disengagement”—Trump’s DHS is public about its actions. In a recent press release recapping its work since Trump retook office, the agency pointed to “nearly 650 press releases,” “more than 2,550 press statements,” and the launch of a “critically acclaimed, groundbreaking new web page” allowing people to search the “Worst of the Worst” ICE arrestees.
McLaughlin grew up in Cincinnati and attended Sycamore High, regarded as one of Ohio’s strongest public schools. After Sycamore, she went to the University of Maryland, where she studied political science and was a member of a sorority, Kappa Alpha Theta. According to a publicly posted résumé, she served as Kappa Alpha Theta’s digital media director—and boosted traffic to the sorority’s Facebook page by 60 percent.
Amid the personnel chaos of the first Trump administration, McLaughlin served as chief of staff for the office of nuclear arms control. After Trump left office, in 2021, she worked for Vivek Ramaswamy—a fellow Ohioan—on his long-shot presidential bid. On that campaign, she worked alongside Ben Yoho, a member of Noem’s gubernatorial reelection team; the two would later marry. She also appeared on ABC News as a Republican pundit.
When Trump returned to the presidency last year and appointed Noem as DHS secretary, McLaughlin was brought on board. (In November, ProPublica reported that DHS awarded 143 million dollars from its advertising budget to a little-known Delaware firm that, in turn, subcontracted work to a company run by Yoho for an undisclosed amount of money. Responding to ProPublica, McLaughlin said DHS didn’t have “visibility” into why Yoho’s company was chosen as a subcontractor: “My marriage is one thing and work is another.”)
On X, McLaughlin uses the folksy handle @TriciaOhio. On her personal Instagram account, she’s posted photos of her wedding and Ohio State football games next to screenshots of Truth Social posts from Trump praising her and a Rick and Morty meme reading “Your boos mean nothing, I’ve seen what makes you cheer.” This month, the Cincinnati Enquirer listed McLaughlin as one of its “people to watch” in 2026. Describing her work to the Enquirer, McLaughlin said, “Media is so much of the battle” on the immigration debate. “It’s a PR war.” When asked about one day running for office in Ohio, McLaughlin answered that she “wouldn’t rule anything out.”
Reporters who cover immigration and DHS say that, in one-on-one conversations, McLaughlin can be disarmingly professional. “Online, she’s just vile,” the national reporter told me. “The persona is all pugnacious and kicking journalists in the teeth and all these fucking horrible things. And then you speak to her and she’s, like, pleasant.” Trying to suss out where the persona ends and the real character begins is tricky, the reporter added. “She knows she’s better off dealing respectfully with a member of the press. The ‘real her’ might be the one online.”
On MAGA-friendly media outlets, McLaughlin is celebrated. In an interview with The Windsor Report, a radio show in Ohio, the host told McLaughlin he was “grateful” for her work, then theorized that anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis were being funded by the Chinese Communist Party. In a sit-down with a Christian outlet called The Lion, Chris Stigall, the interviewer, fawned over McLaughlin, cuing her with softball questions. “If we have hell to pay for making the American homeland more safe and for getting criminal illegal aliens out of this country,” McLaughlin told Stigall, “I’ll take that hell to pay all day.”
When speaking within those friendly confines, McLaughlin has portrayed legacy press outlets as evil. Speaking to the Washington Reporter last year, she said “the extent that the press does the bidding” of “gang members, terrorists and cartel members” is “absolutely stomach churning.” Then, referencing a New York Times piece about a man who was deported to Jamaica, she said that the subject received a “Vogue-like photo shoot” and that the Times “failed to report that this guy had been in prison for kidnapping in New York for 15 years.”
In fact, the piece she appeared to be referencing states that the subject received a “kidnapping conviction he disputed and a 15-year prison sentence he fulfilled.” But with McLaughlin, the details often get lost. Like Trump, she’s uniquely adept at distilling the administration’s actions into talking points: Democrats want blood in the streets, ICE is saving us all, the mainstream press loves killers. “These aren’t ‘mistakes,’” McLaughlin added, in the Washington Reporter interview. “They are machinations by the media to do the bidding of violent criminals.”
On the morning of January 24, federal agents in Minneapolis shot Alex Pretti, a thirty-seven-year-old ICU nurse, at least ten times in five seconds, killing him. Within hours, McLaughlin had released a statement claiming that Pretti, who was carrying a gun for which he had a legal permit, “violently resisted” arrest and was plotting to enact “maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.”
In their own statement, Pretti’s family pointed to the overwhelming video evidence that directly contradicts McLaughlin’s statement. “The sickening lies told about our son by the administration are reprehensible,” they said. “Please get the truth out about our son. He was a good man.”
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