ICE Barbie Kristi Noem might have hoped she’d ended the joke when she dismissed her heavily Botoxed South Park caricature as “lazy” and “petty.” Turns out, she could not have been more wrong.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary was lampooned in brutal fashion by the Comedy Central cartoon.
The hit show depicted her as a cosmetically-modified, gun-toting psycho who kills puppies—a reference to her 2024 memoir in which she admitted to shooting her 14-month-old dog, Cricket, for being “untrainable.”
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The new season’s second installment, “Got a Nut,” introduces Noem in a recruitment video where she brags, “A few years ago, I had to put my puppy down by shooting it in the face, because sometimes doing what’s important means doing what’s hard.”
By the episode’s end, Botox can be seen dripping off her skull.
Speaking on Glenn Beck’s radio show Thursday, Noem—who has been nicknamed ICE Barbie for her love of heavily staged photo ops while wearing full make-up as she joined the organization’s raids—fumed, “It never ends, but it’s so lazy to constantly make fun of women for how they look.
“If they wanted to criticize my job, go ahead and do that, but clearly they can’t, they just pick something petty like that.”
But whereas JD Vance embraced being depicted as a tiny “manbaby” who oils Satan’s backside for President Donald Trump, and appears to have been left alone, speaking out has had the opposite effect for Noem.
Instead, within hours, South Park doubled down—changing the profile photos on its X and Facebook pages to a close-up of the secretary’s grotesquely melting face from last week’s episode.
Switching its avatars ensures the show’s snark sits atop every reply, meme, and clip it reposts—keeping Noem’s gloopy face splashed across millions of timelines just as her complaints generated worldwide headlines.
The DHS had attempted to use a still from the show’s preview to drive recruitment.
“We want to thank South Park for drawing attention to ICE law enforcement recruitment: We are calling on patriotic Americans to help us remove murderers, gang members, pedophiles, and other violent criminals from our country,” a spokesperson for the department said in a statement.
“Benefits available to new ICE recruits include an up to $50,000 signing bonus, student loan forgiveness, and retirement benefits.”
However, after that led 'South Park’s’ X account to sneer, “Wait, so we ARE relevant? #eatabagofd--ks,” the department has since clammed up.
The Daily Beast contacted the Department of Homeland Security for comment. Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin repeated the earlier statement thanking South Park for highlighting its recruitment drive.
