This Isn’t Law Enforcement. It’s a Gravel Pit Execution.

On the same day she executed her 14-month-old puppy in a gravel pit with a shotgun, Kristi Noem marched a goat to the same killing ground and pulled the trigger again.

She tells this story in her own words — proudly — in her 2024 memoir No Going Back, where she claims the dog, Cricket, was “untrainable” and “dangerous” because it ruined a pheasant hunt and killed a neighbor’s chickens. Noem, the then-sitting governor of South Dakota and now the Secretary of Homeland Security, describes taking the puppy to a gravel pit and pulling the trigger herself. Then, apparently still in a killing mood, she rounded up a "rancid" goat that smelled bad and headbutted her kids and put that one down too.

This wasn’t mercy. This wasn’t necessity. And it sure as hell wasn’t what some media outlets, in their usual sheepish euphemism, tried to call it: euthanasia.

Let’s be clear: shooting a young dog in the head because it disobeyed you is not euthanasia. It’s a power fantasy. It’s cruelty. It’s the act of a person who confuses control with justice and believes domination is a virtue.

And that worldview didn’t stop at the gravel pit. It followed her into office — where now, in 2025, Kristi Noem is overseeing mass deportations of people in direct defiance of federal court orders. The woman who once decided her dog didn’t deserve any grace or empathy helps run an administration deciding entire populations don’t either.

This isn’t just bad optics. This is lawlessness.

Judicial Orders Be Damned

On March 24, 2025, Chief Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for D.C. issued a temporary restraining order: stop the deportations. The Trump administration had invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to mass-deport Venezuelan migrants — claiming, without due process, that they were affiliated with a violent gang. The court said: not so fast.

The Executive Branch — the one Noem now helps command — didn’t just drag its feet.

It kept flying the planes.

Multiple deportation flights left for El Salvador after the court ruling, with migrants shackled and loaded on board before legal counsel could intervene. When pressed, administration officials said the flights had already departed, or that the people aboard “weren’t covered by the order,” or that it was “a matter of national security.”

That’s not how law works.
That’s how dictatorship works.

Solicitor General Sarah M. Harris didn’t defend compliance. She asked the Supreme Court to let the Executive keep doing it — to let them continue deporting without due process, calling the judicial intervention “an unconstitutional intrusion.” Attorney General Pam Bondi remained silent, as did much of Congress. And Noem? She toured a mega-prison in El Salvador where some deportees were sent, posed for photos, and bragged about the crackdown.

This Is Not “Law Enforcement”

Let’s correct the record here, too. What Noem is doing is not “law enforcement.” What Trump is doing is not “enforcing immigration policy.” What Bondi and Harris are doing is not “protecting national security.”

It is judicial non-compliance. It is defiance of a lawful federal order. It is the willful sabotage of the constitutional separation of powers.

If any other federal agency ignored a judge’s order — maybe the EPA or the SEC — there would likely be contempt charges, firings, possibly jail. But when it comes to immigration? When it comes to people this administration has already dehumanized? Suddenly enforcement is optional. Suddenly the Constitution is a suggestion.

The same woman who looked a puppy in the eyes and decided it wasn’t worth training now oversees ICE and CBP operations that strip humans of basic rights before launching them onto tarmacs in the dark. And just like her memoir’s gravel pit tale, she calls it necessary. She calls it strong leadership.

It's not. It’s cruelty, cloaked in process.

The Gravel Pit Doctrine

What we’re witnessing now is the Gravel Pit Doctrine of governance. If a person, group, or court gets in your way, you drag them out of view and kill their authority — metaphorically or literally. You reframe empathy as weakness, and you frame violence as order.

• When a court tells you to stop deporting people without due process? You fly the planes anyway.

• When a judge says the Constitution still applies to immigrants? You appeal and call the judge “radical.”

• When civil rights offices within DHS raise questions about legality? You shut them down.

This isn’t tough decision-making. It’s not rural realism. It’s not “law and order.”

It’s authoritarianism — and it’s metastasizing inside the U.S. government.

Let’s Drop the Euphemisms

This country is being run by people who no longer respect the law. They don’t fear the Judiciary. They don’t believe in balance. They believe in obedience.

So let’s stop calling things what they’re not.

Kristi Noem did not euthanize her dog. She shot it in the face with a shotgun.

Kristi Noem is not enforcing the law. She’s defying court orders and calling it patriotism.

And Donald Trump? He is not conducting sensitive national security operations.

He is ignoring the Constitution and daring the other branches to stop him.

The Founders never gave the courts an army. They gave them the force of law.

Now we have an Executive who treats that force like a suggestion — or a joke.

And if we let it continue, the next thing to die in the gravel pit won’t be a ppaqqqa@dog.

It’ll be the rule of law itself.

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