Kristi Noem's Vicious Immigrant Cannibal Probably (Definitely) Imaginary

Imagine that.

Feb 24, 2026

One particularly effective way of getting away with telling a lie is to tell one that people want to believe more than they care whether or not it is true — something that affirms their worldview, makes them feel vindicated after having felt unfairly judged for something, and makes the people they hate look just as bad as they always knew they were, deep in their bones. It’s also always helpful to make that lie something so shocking that people would feel a little bad asking for actual evidence, because who would lie about something like that?

Well, Kristi Noem would, for one.

Last year, as part of her desperate quest to push US Americans to see immigrants as less-than-human so they wouldn’t be as bothered when she sends them and their children to concentration camps, Noem told a frightening story about how one of the people ICE deported was a cannibal who not only ate several people prior to being caught, but who tried to eat himself on the plane ride out.

Of course, as with practically all accusations of cannibalism that do not involve severe mental illness or some kind of Donner Party/Alive-type situation, it turns out that this whole story was bullshit. Or, rather, after a year of searching, The Intercept was unable to find a single person or piece of evidence to back up her story, and in fact found several people willing to say it was an outright lie.

Via The Intercept:

Now, three officials from federal law enforcement agencies — including Noem’s own Department of Homeland Security — with knowledge of the allegations say the entire story was fabricated.
“It is completely false,” said one senior law enforcement official who is familiar with the allegation but not authorized to speak publicly on the subject.
Two other federal law enforcement officials echoed this, telling The Intercept that the claims were ludicrous and that there was no evidence corroborating the story.

The three sources all tried to independently verify Noem’s claim, including by looking into ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (which would have specified what the supposed cannibal had done), and no one was able to find a single thing.

Noem first debuted this story in a July press conference, saying that she was told the story by a US Marshal.

Indeed, that was the explanation a DHS spokesperson gave for her assertion.

“What ‘fabrication’ of the story of the cannibal?” they said. “She was told that story on a deportation flight by one of the air marshals.”

Yeah, and my across the street neighbor told me she had a gorilla in her garage when we were five. What of it? It was Noem’s responsibility to verify the tale before taking it on the road and she failed to do that, because she wanted to believe it. Just like everyone who believed her wanted to believe it. At the very least, she should have taken down the name of said air marshal — who, nota bene, has yet to come forward and take responsibility for this pipe dream.

Of course, by Noem’s telling, this kind of thing is just so common that this random US Marshal barely batted an eyelash at the situation, because running into an autosarcophagic cannibal is just a normal, everyday occurrence for them.

“You know, what bothered me the most is that this US Marshal just said it like it was normal,” Noem told Jesse Watters in an interview. “He said he was literally eating his own arms. That is what he did. He called himself a cannibal and ate other people and ate himself that day.”

The real clue that this is bullshit, of course, is that we don’t know who this cannibal even is. I feel pretty confident that, were there an actual cannibal, on a plane, eating himself, that Kristi Noem would have self-funded hundreds of billboards across the nation featuring his face and his specific crimes. Certainly, it would have been all over Fox News for the last seven months and brought up every time ICE killed a random US citizen. We would know who he ate and how he prepared them. We would know everything about his childhood. We would have seen multiple interviews with his neighbors saying that he was quiet and kept to himself mostly and we would convince ourselves that by learning about him, we could somehow prevent ourselves from being eaten by another cannibal.

Why?

Because despite what conspiracy theorists may think, cannibalism is extremely rare, which is why we all know so many cannibals by name or, at least, by nickname. Hell, how many documentaries or podcasts do we have about the Cannibal Cop, who didn’t even actually eat anyone but merely talked about doing so in a chatroom? I don’t know, I’ve never counted, but I’d have to imagine there are a whole lot of them.

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This whole cannibal thing has been a meme on the Right for years now, and I mean that literally.

Most notably, in 2024, Elon Musk asserted without evidence (as if he’d have it any other way) that cannibal Haitian gangs were roaming our streets, armed with fava beans and chianti, looking for victims to have over for dinner. QAnon people have insisted for years now that “elites” regularly eat babies and use their skin to make red baby leather shoes, and that they scare babies and children with satanic rituals in order to drain their adrenal glands of adrenochrome, despite the fact that adrenal glands neither store nor produce “adrenochrome.”

Given this previous ridiculousness, there was/is no reason for Noem to believe that anyone who didn’t hate her already would expect her to produce any evidence that this cannibal existed in the first place.

They say extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but, in practice, the opposite is usually true. The more absurd a belief is and the less evidence there is for it, the harder and more desperately people will cling to it as an absolute truth. That seems to be the case with this … and with pretty much everything else this administration puts out there.

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