Noem’s Senseless Cruelty Hammers Hamlin County Dairy Workforce

Hey, did you hear the one about how Kristi Noem went to Washington and started killing her home state’s businesses with her Trump-Gestapo fanaticism? Not only did she send ICE goons to drag eight workers out of the Madison Manitou plant in May just days after being feted with an honorary doctorate from DSU, but she then ordered an immigration audit that forced her neighbors Dorothy and Rodney Elliott to dismiss two-thirds of their reliable dairy workforce:

The names on the list included some of Dorothy Elliott’s best employees: hardworking, reliable, honest.

Most had been working at Drumgoon Dairy for years. Some worked there for nearly two decades, playing a role in the operation’s expansion and success.

But after an audit of the dairy at the end of May by the federal Department of Homeland Security, 38 of those employees are gone.

The department said they each had inaccurate, outdated or incomplete proof of U.S. citizenship or permission to work in the country.

Elliott co-owns the farm near Lake Norden, 5 miles from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s eastern South Dakota home. Elliott asked the affected employees for updated documentation but ultimately had to fire those who weren’t able to adequately resolve the problems with their documents. One person returned home because his visa was expiring, and another quit.

The audit decimated Elliott’s workforce, once more than 50 employees, dropping it to just 16.

…Drumgoon was never audited before. In her past dealings with the Department of Homeland Security during nearly two decades of running the dairy, Elliott said, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents would merely tell her they were searching for a person and ask for a notification if the person applied for a job.

This time was different. After an audit, employers are required to terminate unauthorized workers who can’t prove their employability, according to a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson [Makenzie Huber, “Noem’s South Dakota Neighbors Hit with an Immigration Audit That Decimates Their Workforce,” South Dakota Searchlight, 2025.10.10].

Rodney Elliott himself is an immigrant, recruited by immigrant Joop Bollen two decades ago and funded by four Korean immigrants through EB-5 visa investments to put immigrants to work milking cows and shoveling shit for South Dakota’s greater good. From the beginning of their operations in 2006, the Elliotts relied on immigrant labor to sustain Drumgoon Dairy. Hamlin County locals just didn’t want to do this grueling work (the Noem kids found it easier to look to Mom for job favors), so the Elliotts had to recruit people willing to travel thousands of miles to a foreign and sometimes unfriendly land and spend years away from the families they’ve come to America to support.

You want grit? Drumgoon Dairy’s workers have grit, and Kristi Noem chased them away.

The Elliotts can’t even find local help for the high-end jobs running their milking robots:

At Drumgoon Dairy, Elliott has tried automating aspects of her operation. She and her husband put in 20 robots a few years ago with the expectation they could hire students from nearby Lake Area Technical College’s robotics program to maintain them.

They posted robotics maintenance positions to attract graduates, but the response was deflating.

“To date, no one,” Elliott said.

She plans to remove the robots because the cost of running and servicing them is too expensive. So far, they’ve sold three [Huber, 2025.10.10].

The Elliotts’ plight highlights the victimless nature of the immigration “crimes” that Secretary Noem is prosecuting with such vigor and fascist glee. We have no evidence that the people who hopped the border to milk Drumgoon’s cows committed any other crimes. Research shows that immigrants commit fewer crimes than U.S.-born citizens, and crime rates among illegal immigrants are even lower than among their documented compatriots. The immigrant workforce at Drumgoon and all of South Dakota’s other state-favored dairies do nothing but boost GDP and sales tax revenues (and participate in an unsustainable industry that ruins air and water quality but at whose stench we turn up our noses and sigh, “Ah, the smell of money!”, but that’s another debate). Immigrants make possible the business for which South Dakota says it is open.

But the mandate of the king Noem serves is to give masked brownshirts opportunities to bully more brown people (and, increasingly, all of us), so forget all that talk about economic growth. For Secretary Noem, plain cruelty now takes priority over the economic well-being of her old neighbors and her home state.