Governor Kristi Noem’s Weekly Column: A Safer South Dakota

A Safer South Dakota
By: Governor Kristi Noem 
April 16, 2021

One of my main responsibilities as Governor is to keep South Dakota safe. It’s something that I take very seriously. After all, I love this state. I love the people who live here. In a small state like ours, we’re all really neighbors. We get to know one another. And we work together to take care of each other.

Part of that responsibility means calling out when other people are making our state less safe. If you look at our nation’s southern border right now, that’s exactly what’s happening. President Biden has undone years of progress securing our border, and it’s led to a massive surge of illegal immigration into our country.

We can’t possibly know who all these people are. In fact, media outlets have reported that Border Patrol has apprehended several individuals on the terrorism watch list coming into our country. The number of illegal drugs like fentanyl crossing the southern border are up by 233% compared to previous years. Border Patrol needs more help, and they aren’t able to catch everything, so we have no idea what else may be getting through.

When President Biden started asking states to take some of these illegal immigrants and house them, I told him “No way” before he asked South Dakota. Those illegal immigrants can call us when they’re an American. I wanted to make sure he got that message loud and clear. We don’t know who these individuals are, so taking them would make South Dakota less safe.

Over the past four years, President Trump took decisive action to make America safer. He worked to secure the border. He built hundreds of miles of border wall. And he improved the vetting of people coming into our country, especially in the refugee resettlement program.

In fact, I took some criticism two years ago for taking in refugees to our state. But I did so because I was confident that President Trump and his administration had vetted these people.  They’d weeded out the bad actors. We had a good idea who these folks were, and having them here would not make our state less safe.

Another part of keeping our state safe is attracting high quality law enforcement officers to protect and serve our communities. Over the past year, law enforcement has been attacked and demeaned in other communities across the country. We responded to these attacks by recruiting more law enforcement officers to move to South Dakota, and we’ve had tremendous success in those efforts.

In the wake of the recent riots in Minneapolis and other places, I am going to be relaunching that campaign to recruit law enforcement officers to move to our state. In South Dakota, we respect them. We won’t defund them. Instead, we’ll work with them to make South Dakota safer.

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11 thoughts on “Governor Kristi Noem’s Weekly Column: A Safer South Dakota”

  1. A Safer South Dakota?

    I just ask that we try to be objective for a moment.

    Did she keep South Dakota safe? Tell me – what was the death rate from surrounding states from Covid? And if applied to South Dakota, how many lives would have been spared?

    North Dakota was slightly better than us. Minnesota, Nebraska and Wyoming had just over half the rate of South Dakota. If we had the death rate equal to that of those three states, we would have saved over 700 lives! And countless illnesses.

    Kristi Noem wants to pretend that racial unrest and immigrants are the problem. But they caused how many deaths in our state? Was there even one?

    She is responsible for the excess Covid deaths. And, ladies and gentleman, they… actually happened.

    1. I just crunched today’s numbers and South Dakota’s case fatality rate is 1.61 % and nationally it’s 1.79%

      In Massachusetts where they are SO SAFE they have had businesses ordered shuttered and they have had a mask mandate for over a year, with a $300 fine for noncompliance, the case fatality rate is 2.71%

      Wow that mask mandate/lockdown thing really works, doesn’t it?

      1. Yeah, it’s totally reasonable to compare a state with a population density of 880 people per square mile to one with 160 per square mile. No problems there, Anne. Perfect comparison.

  2. She cares about keeping SD safe? Her record on Covid says and urge to play with fire in a drought-stricken forest say otherwise.

    She’s a malicious narcissist and a wholly incompetent leader. She can’t keep a steady staff, her legislative priorities were and are spectacular failures, and she causes her own problems with flip flopping on issues because she talks first and thinks second.

    Case in point: police are paid via tax dollars, so if we’re going to needlessly expand law enforcement to bolster her 2024 profile, how exactly does Noem plan to provide jobs and pay salaries for the influx of public employees?

  3. One wonders, does “recent riots” include the one provoked by her idol on January 6?

    1. Waters said she hopes the jury delivers a verdict of “guilty, guilty, guilty.”

      “And if (they) don’t, we cannot go away,” Waters continued. “We’ve got to stay on the street. We get more active, we’ve got to get more confrontational. We’ve got to make sure that they know that we mean business.”

      Does the above statement call for rioting and violence? So if things don’t go their way in Minneapolis and riots take place with massive property damage and death, will you be unforgivingly critical of the loudmouth from Kalifornia, Maxine Waters, just as you are for President Trump?

  4. Deaths due to car accidents increased by 38% in 2020. What actions has she taken to make our roads safer.

  5. Drugs seem to be an easy scapegoat for her to blame all the problems on. When you blame an object for a problem, and try to make it all illegal, don’t be surprised when that is brought up for another solution to problems….*cough* *cough* guns *cough*. She talks about freedom with masks and guns, but then not with guns or healthcare. She has no logic from what I can tell, unless it’s some sort of method to keep the poor down or the stupid to remain stupid.

  6. Her response on covid was perfect, and for that I want to defend her against attacks from idiots like elk, but her anti-democratic actions with respect to Amendment A are reprehensible and unforgivable. She gets no quarter from me.

    1. “Perfect”. Her Covid policy was perfect?

      I just showed you that all of the surrounding states had fewer cases than South Dakota… and you call ME an idiot?

      Please tell us why it was perfect. I’d love to hear it.

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