Similar purse-snatching happened blocks away in Washington days before Kristi Noem's bag was taken
NBC News discovered the similarities in the two incidents after requesting reports of thefts in the neighborhood from the DC Metropolitan Police Department.
It's not clear if the two incidents are connected, but the victim in the first purse snatching believes they are.
'I'm shocked at the similarity of the crime,' she told NBC News when she described how her purse was stolen Thursday at a restaurant in the downtown Westin Hotel.
A thief stole Noem's bag, which contained $3,000 in cash, Sunday at Capital Burger, which is two blocks from teh Westin, a DHS spokesperson and sources familiar with the matter said.
The suspect was a white male wearing dark clothing, a dark-colored baseball hat and a white N95 mask, according to two sources familiar with the surveillance footage.
That person entered Capital Burger at 7:55 p.m., sat near Noem's table, scooted closer and used his foot to slide her purse toward him, according to surveillance footage viewed by law enforcement, sources said. Within minutes, the man picked up Noem's purse, placed it under his jacket, walked out of the restaurant and down the street, they said.
In the earlier theft Thursday, the victim, who asked that NBC News not name her publicly, arrived late in Washington with her husband and son so they went to diner at a restaurant inside the Westin Hotel.
She said it wasn't until they got the check around 9:20 p.m. that she realized her purse was gone.
A police report states that the suspect walked by the woman's table and took her bag 'from the chair it was hanging on' in one fell swoop.
The victim said she got a call after the theft to let her know that her health insurance card had been found at a store a three-minute walk from the hotel, which is just steps from the restaurant where Noem's bag was stolen.
The suspect in the earlier theft was also a white male, wearing dark clothing, a dark-colored baseball cap and an N-95 mask, according to the victim, who said she viewed the security footage of the man stealing her purse.
She said that after hearing about Noem's theft, she almost called police because the secretary's experience sounded so similar to her own.
A Metropolitan Police Department detective contacted the woman on Tuesday and mentioned the Noem case and asked her if she was also involved in politics. The woman said she is not.
'My husband said this guy must be awful to target women who are out of to dinner with their families," the woman said.
She said the theft was 'super stressful, and it's just violating.'
The Secret Service is investigating the Noem case.
Washington's Metropolitan Police Department said it had no comment on Noem's case.
There had been no arrests by Tuesday afternoon in either incident.
It's unclear whether Noem was specifically targeted because of her position as a member of President Donald Trump's Cabinet.
Noem has U.S. Secret Service protection. At least two on-duty plainclothes members were at the restaurant's bar, in between where Noem was seated and the front doors, according to a source who witnessed the meal. That source said that the restaurant wasn't very busy at the time Noem's purse was taken.
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The Independent
17 hours ago
- The Independent
Noem wants ‘Alligator Alcatraz' detention centers near airport runways across US to boost migrant deportation ‘efficiency'
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem envisions more 'Alligator Alcatraz'-like immigration detention centers across the country, including near airport runways, to boost the 'efficiency' of Donald Trump's mass deportation agenda. The Florida facility is serving as a model for state-run detention centers, and 'the locations we're looking at are right by airport runways that will help give us an efficiency that we've never had before,' Noem told CBS News. Noem told the network she has appealed directly to state officials, and 'most of them are interested.' She added: 'Many of them have facilities that may be empty or underutilized.' The administration has reportedly sought out facilities in Arizona, Nebraska and Louisiana, which currently houses the only Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center on a tarmac. The Alexandria Staging Facility sits across from the Alexandria International Airport, which has emerged as the nation's deportation capital under the Trump administration. For more than a decade, ICE — which operates under Homeland Security — has turned to corporate shipping and logistics companies for inspiration for rounding up and deporting immigrants. Shortly after he was tapped to lead the agency in March, ICE's acting director, Todd Lyons, bluntly compared the movement of people to packages. 'We need to get better at treating this like a business, where this mass deportation operation is something like you would see and say, like, Amazon trying to get your Prime delivery within 24 hours,' Lyons told a law enforcement conference in Phoenix in April. 'So, trying to figure out how to do that with human beings,' he said. Lyons later expanded on his remarks about treating immigrants like packages in an interview with Boston 25 News that same month. 'The key part that got left out of that statement was, I said, they deal with boxes, we deal with human beings, which is totally different,' he said. ICE 'should be run like a corporation,' he told the outlet. 'We need to be better about removing those individuals who have been lawfully ordered out of the country in a safe, efficient manner,' Lyons continued. 'We can't trade innovation and efficiency for how we treat the people in our custody.' In a statement to The Independent, Homeland Security assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin said the agency is 'working at turbo speed on cost-effective and innovative ways to deliver on the American people's mandate for mass deportations of criminal illegal aliens.' 'With the opening of Alligator Alcatraz, we expanded facilities and bed space in just days,' she added. 'We look forward to partnering with other states to open other similar facilities to house some the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens.' Named Alligator Alcatraz by state and federal officials, a 3,000-bed detention center opened in south Florida last month within the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport, roughly 43 miles from Miami in the middle of the Everglades. A federal lawsuit accuses the facility of blocking detainees from legal counsel and forcing people into 'overcrowded, unsanitary, and harsh conditions' with inadequate food, flood-prone cells, and 'excessive use of force' from guards that sent at least one man to a hospital. It's also unclear who is actually running the facility and who wants to take responsibility for it. Government lawyers could not immediately answer in court whether the federal government or Florida is responsible. In court filings, immigration officials claimed that the facility is operating through the federal 287(g) program, which allows local and state law enforcement agencies to enforce federal immigration law. ICE has inked nearly 800 such agreements covering 40 states. 'We need to get to the bottom of the interplay between the federal and state authorities on who's running this thing,' Florida District Judge Rodolfo A. Ruiz II said during a recent court hearing in a lawsuit against the facility. The makeshift facility is expected to cost roughly $450 million within its first year, at roughly $245 per inmate bed per night, according to DHS. ICE spent roughly $187 per adult detainee per day in 2023. Still, Noem claims that the Alligator Alcatraz model is 'much better' than ICE's current arrangement with local jails and for-profit prison companies, which operate a vast majority of the nation's detention centers. Funding for Alligator Alcatraz largely comes from FEMA's Shelter and Services Program. The incoming wave of state-run detention centers is expected to tap into $45 billion in new funding for ICE as part of Trump's 'big, beautiful bill.' The bill also allocates $30 billion for an aggressive recruitment campaign to hire another 10,000 ICE agents. Altogether, the bill earmarks more than $170 billion for immigration enforcement — a boon to for-profit contractors and cash-strapped states looking to tap into billions of taxpayer dollars. Putting those new facilities near airports and runways will help ICE cut costs by 'facilitating quick turnarounds,' Noem told CBS. 'They're all strategically designed to make sure that people are in beds for less days,' Noem said. 'It can be much more efficient once they get their hearings, due process, paperwork.'
The Independent
19 hours ago
- The Independent
The Trump administration is using ‘fascist propaganda' to promote its mass deportation campaign, experts say
The Department of Homeland Security is accused of sharing thinly-veiled nativist propaganda on social media through art as it pursues a sweeping campaign of mass deportations. Throughout July, the X account of the department run by Kristi Noem posted a steady stream of paintings exemplifying a very particular version of the 'homeland.' That has included posting the 1872 work American Progress by John Gast, in which an ethereal Lady Liberty floats above the Western landscape, as white settlers advance across the frame with stage coaches and rail lines, while Native Americans and buffalo run to the margins. Another X post features the contemporary painting A Prayer for a New Life, by Morgan Weistling, a close-up of a white pioneer couple clutching a baby in the back of a covered wagon, along with the caption, ' Remember your Homeland's Heritage.' A third such post includes Morning Pledge, a nostalgic mid-20th century scene of kids in a small town walking towards an American flag, as painted by Thomas Kinkade. The creators and guardians of these works have expressed outrage over being drafted into DHS publicity — and history and politics experts have also raised concerns over this art being used as 'propaganda'. Weistling said he wasn't consulted prior to the Trump administration using his work. The Kinkade Family Foundation, meanwhile, said Morning Pledge was also being used without permission, perverted to 'promote division and xenophobia associated with the ideals of DHS.' The foundation told The Independent that Kinkade, who died in 2012, struggled in life with poverty as a child and substance abuse as an adult. He viewed his paintings, known for their soft, glowing light, as a way to 'imagine a different kind of world, where warmth, safety, and belonging are human rights for all.' Beyond the canvas, Kinkade helped raise millions for the poor, while his foundation has handed out thousands of therapeutic art kits, including in farmworker communities. 'That vision wasn't meant for a select few, but for everyone,' the foundation said in an email. 'Throughout his life, Thomas sought to respond to moments of hardship with compassion and solidarity, standing with communities made vulnerable.T o see his work used in ways that promote exclusion and division betrays the very heart of what he stood for.' The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that the agency 'honors artwork that celebrates America's heritage and history, and we are pleased that the media is highlighting our efforts to showcase these patriotic pieces.' 'If the media needs a history lesson on the brave men and women who blazed the trails and forged this Republic from the sweat of their brow, we are happy to send them a history textbook,' Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in the statement. 'This administration is unapologetically proud of American history and American heritage.' According to Richard White, a distinguished historian of the West and professor emeritus at Stanford University, DHS's use of works like American Progress is as ironic as it is revealing. The painting depicted a highly nostalgic, mythologized version of the country even at the moment it was created. In reality, instead of the peaceful scene, violence was everywhere, with the U.S. Army (not pictured in the painting) involved in violent, dispossessing wars with indigenous tribes across the West, and groups like the KKK carrying out racist terror campaigns against newly emancipated Black people after the U.S. Civil War. 'It's not about history,' White said of American Progress, but rather a 'mythic narrative' of America. 'The original picture erased the reality around it.' White suspects the Trump administration is using the painting now for a similar purpose. The historian lives in Los Angeles, where masked federal immigration agents and military troops spent weeks conducting dragnet immigration operations, an effort he compares to the Nazi regime's Gestapo secret police. 'The real problem is what's actually happening on the streets of Los Angeles and other cities,' he said. Journalist Spencer Ackerman, author of Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump, sees similar far-right currents in DHS's images, strains of nativism he argues have existed just below the surface at the department since its founding in 2002 after the 9/11 terror attacks. 'It was definitely a crypto-right wing move from the start after 9/11 to use a word like 'homeland' in particular in the context of security,' he told The Independent. Prior to this point, he said, the term 'homeland' was not in mainstream use in this way in the U.S. It had the ring of European-style nationalism (and worse) back then, a poor fit for a pluralist democracy in which most of the population, at some point in history, came from somewhere else. Trump's DHS, however, has taken this implicit ideology to the explicit extreme, Ackerman argued, using the tools of 'far-right internet culture' to provoke people by using jarring memes plus the 'classic fascist propaganda' of armed agents kicking in doors to arrest mostly non-white people. 'This is a turn. This is different,' he said. 'This is very racialized, very essentialized propaganda that DHS did not previously explicitly traffic in, even if this probably reflects the id of the Department of Homeland Security that whole time.' The administration's immigration PR efforts have extended beyond the DHS X account and its selection of pioneer paintings. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has earned the derisive nickname ' ICE Barbie ' from critics for her frequent photo-ops in cowboy oufits and combat-ready gear matching with the various agencies under her purview. Both Trump and Noem have featured in wartime-style recruiting posters urging viewers to 'Defend the Homeland, Join ICE Today,' as the administration offers $50,000 sign-on bonuses for new ICE officers. Trump has long leaned into a nostalgic aesthetic as a notable part of his politics. One of his final executive orders in 2020 involved a demand that all new federal buildings in Washington be built in the ' beautiful ' neo-classical style, with marble and columns meant to evoke the temples of ancient Greece and Rome, while his signature political slogan, 'Make America Great Again,' includes an unmistakable nod to a heroic past. Government officials have long trafficked in tropes and propaganda about disfavored groups, too, White said, pointing to the virulently racist popular depictions of the Japanese during WWII. What stands out in this present era, however, is the seeming commitment of whole government departments to producing such images. In time, however, White said even these purposely exclusionary images of national propaganda reveal their limitations. 'In myth, nothing ever changes,' he said. 'In history, things do change.'
Daily Record
a day ago
- Daily Record
Mum left toddler home alone to die while she went on holiday
Kristel Candelario's baby Jailyn tragically died in her playpen after screaming for days. A mum who was jailed for life after leaving her baby home alone while she went on holiday has spoken out from her prison cell. Kristel Candelario left 16-month-old Jailyn by herself at her home in Cleveland, Ohio, for 10 days in June 2023. She was left in her playpen with only a few bottles of milk. When she returned from her trip to Michigan and Puerto Rico, she found the tot unresponsive and called emergency services. Jailyn was "extremely dehydrated" and covered in faeces and urine inside the dirty playpen. She was tragically pronounced dead after police attended, with investigators branding the case as the most harrowing they had dealt with during their careers, the Mirror reports. Candelario admitted she had "committed a diabolical act" and ultimately pleaded guilty to one charge of aggravated murder and another of child endangerment. She was sentenced to life behind bars without the possibility of release. She has since told her side of the story, revealing she had suffered from mental health issues in the months leading up to her daughter's death. Speaking from the Cleveland prison where she is serving her sentence, she told NBC News she had been admitted to hospital in January and February 2023 due to her mental health. She told the outlet: "For that reason, I was in the hospital without being able to walk for exactly almost two weeks. And in the month of March, I mean, my [now] ex-boyfriend and I wanted to take a vacation." She claimed to have told him she would leave Jailyn being looked after by her mother. She added that her mental state was behind her sudden decision to travel: "Actually, I left for the trip as a result of an impulse that I had, that I took, grabbed my four things, and ran out of the house like when someone is being chased. 'It's not that at that moment I thought that, 'Ah, I was going to Puerto Rico ... I was going to be super comfortable.' No, I never thought that. I simply wanted to get away from a life of stress, depression, and anxiety. I didn't want to continue living, because I had had a lot of problems in my life.' Join the Daily Record WhatsApp community! Get the latest news sent straight to your messages by joining our WhatsApp community today. You'll receive daily updates on breaking news as well as the top headlines across Scotland. No one will be able to see who is signed up and no one can send messages except the Daily Record team. All you have to do is click here if you're on mobile, select 'Join Community' and you're in! If you're on a desktop, simply scan the QR code above with your phone and click 'Join Community'. We also treat our community members to special offers, promotions, and adverts from us and our partners. If you don't like our community, you can check out any time you like. To leave our community click on the name at the top of your screen and choose 'exit group'. If you're curious, you can read our Privacy Notice. When her then-boyfriend asked about her daughter, she told him she was fine, recalling: "When he mentioned [the girl] to me, it was like when someone reminds you of someone who's not with you at that moment." She considered asking a neighbour to check on her but never did, which she now sees as a "mistake". Her parents believed she was still at home with her, while they took their own trip with her older daughter, aged seven at the time. Recalling the moment she found Jailyn unresponsive, Candelario said: 'That's when my world fell apart. Not because maybe I was thinking about going to prison. That's the least important thing, because one is an adult and one can accept one's mistakes. [I was in] despair. I felt she could be saved; things didn't have to happen that way because my daughter was doing well, I always took care of her.' CNN reported during her sentencing that the court was told how the tot's screams were picked up by a neighbour's doorbell camera. Forensic pathologist Elizabeth Mooney explained: 'The pain and suffering she endured lasted not only hours, not days, but possibly even a week. "This feeling of abandonment for days on end, coupled with the pain of starvation and extreme thirst, is a type of suffering I don't think any of us could ever fully fathom.' Passing sentence, Judge Brendan Sheehan told Candelario: 'The bond between a mother and a child is one of the most purest and most sacred bonds. It's a relationship built on love, trust, and unwavering protection. … You committed the ultimate act of betrayal. 'That little baby persevered, waiting for someone to save her. And you could have done that with a simple phone call. Instead, I see photos of you on a beach while your child was eating her own faeces in an attempt to survive.' He added: 'Just as you didn't let Jailyn out of her confinement until she died, so too you should spend the rest of your life in a cell without freedom. The only difference is that prison will at least feed you.' If you're strugglin g and need to talk, the Samaritans operate a free helpline open 24/7 on 116 123. Alternatively, you can email jo@ or visit their site to find your local branch.
