Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has repeatedly claimed that the U.S. government deported a cannibal that “ate other people” and then, while on a flight from the U.S., became so “deranged” that he began to “eat himself.”

Noem first shared the dubious tale late last week during an interview with Fox News’s Jesse Watters. The Cabinet secretary said that a U.S. marshal “off-handedly” told her about a cannibal on a “planeload of illegals.” When Noem asked, “What do you mean he was a cannibal?” the marshal replied: “He started to eat his own arms.”

Watters probed further. “Was this bad hombre handcuffed to something and he was trying to chew his arm off so he could escape, or was he just hungry?” he asked. “You know, what bothered me the most is that this U.S. Marshal just said it like it was normal,” Noem replied, adding, “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.”

Noem repeated the story on Tuesday as she and President Donald Trump toured a migrant detention facility in the Florida Everglades, officially named “Alligator Alcatraz,” that will house up to 5,000 people and cost around $450 million a year to run.

“The other day, I was talking to some marshals that have been partnering with ICE,” she said, referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “They said that they had detained a cannibal and put him on a plane to take him home, and while they had him in his seat, he started to eat himself and they had to get him off and get him medical attention.”

As Trump nodded along, Noem continued: “These are the kind of deranged individuals that are on our streets in America, that we’re trying to target and get out of our country because they are so deranged they don’t belong here.”

Noem did not reply to repeated requests by The Intercept for further information about the alleged incident and the supposed cannibal immigrant.

Cannibals — real and imagined — have been the source of fear and lurid fascination for Westerners stretching back to at least the 15th century, when Christopher Columbus kicked off the colonization of the Americas. Panic over supposed subhuman, barbarous savages helped to justify all manner of racism, violence, exclusion, assimilation, territorial expansion, and conquest. These weaponized racial myths are baked into colonial rhetoric and foundational to Western bigotry.

Despite issuing an endless stream of sensational press releases about deportations and crimes by immigrants, ICE has not referenced the cannibal immigrant deportee mentioned by Noem in any of its reports.

Requests for additional information sent to ICE and the Department of Homeland Security went unanswered.

Unhinged claims of cannibalism have become a theme in the Trump orbit.

In March 2024, tech billionaire and future Trump White House adviser Elon Musk and other right-wing pundits advanced claims of Haitians and Haitian immigrants as cannibals. Right-wing gadfly Ian Miles Cheong,

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