One of the problems of being competent is that people take your achievements for granted.

Pretty soon they forget all about them and concoct new complaints or demands.

This is the case with President Trump’s astonishingly successful fulfilled promise on border security, achieved within the first 100 days of his second term by his most underestimated Cabinet secretary, Kristi Noem, the tough-minded Homeland Security chief pilloried by the left as “ICE Barbie” because they can’t find anything real to criticize.

Thanks to Noem and “border czar” Tom Homan, as well as the president’s own Day One executive orders, Trump could truthfully declare at the end of April that the southern border was “closed,” with a 95% plunge in daily encounters and not a single alien released into the country.

But then came the hard part of unwinding Joe Biden’s toxic legacy: deportations.

This week, I observed Noem in action when she joined more than 100 heavily armed Border Patrol and ICE agents in armored vehicles with helicopter and drone support to execute a felony arrest warrant on a criminal illegal alien.

The predawn raid in the peaceful Chicago suburb of Elgin netted a total of five illegals from Mexico and Venezuela, with DHS alleging it had found convictions and arrests against three of the men for assault, felony stalking and aggravated DUI.

The operation targeted just one person, Carlos Gonzalez-Leon, who was previously deported to Mexico but returned under Biden and has been convicted for assault causing bodily harm on a family member.

Several days of surveillance of the rented house where he was living showed several other men coming and going and established a pattern of daily behavior for the household.

On Tuesday, Noem met with the large team of armed operators at a DHS facility just after 4 a.m., as they ran through the plan of action including contingencies for “shots fired,” “officer down,”........

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