QUITO, Ecuador — Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem told Blaze Media on the last day of her South American tour that Ecuador’s president said he would consider accepting Venezuelans who are in the United States illegally.
Noem visited and signed deals with her counterparts this week in Argentina, Chile, and Ecuador to continue ensuring cooperation in the region to prevent illegal immigrants and hardened criminals from reaching North America. The idea of sending Venezuelans to a third country was presented to President Daniel Noboa by Noem during her hours-long meeting with him and other ministers at the Carondelet Palace.
“We are very close to signing a safe third country agreement with [Noboa]. … He has a program here where he is letting law-abiding Venezuelans come in, and he’s training them, giving them jobs, giving them visas for two years. And so I said, ‘Would you take some of ours because we have up to a million Venezuelans in the United States that are there illegally,’ and so he said he would consider it,” Noem explained.
“Those are discussions that happen when you are here that make it possible to speed up our efforts” for mass deportations, she added.
‘We were thinking out of the box in ways that we can help them … fight these cartels so that [cocaine] never reaches the United States.’
Should a third-country agreement be solidified with Noboa, it would be a big win for the Trump administration domestically as well as regionally since it would then put pressure on other Latin American countries, like Brazil and Colombia, to play ball.
“The more we’re building these relationships with other countries surrounding them and on their borders, the more pressure it puts on them. So those conversations are still ongoing,” Noem said, noting that Colombian President Gustavo Petro “has not been helpful” on cracking down on drug trafficking in his country.
Tren de Aragua in crosshairs as Noem signs deal with Chile to help prevent foreign gangs from entering US Alex Brandon-Pool/Getty Images
Since much of the cocaine made in Colombia is then trafficked through Ecuador in order to reach the United States, Noem said the United States will help Ecuador fortify its border: “We were thinking out of the box in ways that we can help them harden their northern border and help fight these cartels so that it never reaches the United States.”
During the South American tour, the Department of Homeland Security launched its renewed recruitment drive for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement now that it has been given a large budget to support more personnel and higher pay.
Noem revealed DHS has made job offers to 1,000 applicants to join ICE, with some of those offers being sent to former officers who left ICE during the Biden-Harris administration out of frustration.
While in Ecuador, Noem signed an agreement to station an Ecuadorian police liaison at the Customs and Border Protection’s National Targeting Center to streamline data-sharing between the two countries.
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