Dodo Doeden Adopts Noem Line on Drug Cartels on Indian Reservations

Toby Doeden is a lot like Trump and Noem when it comes to race-baiting. In his South Dakota Searchlight interview, he says he wants to talk with the tribes but repeats Kristi Noem’s accusation that Mexican drug cartels run rampant on South Dakota’s Indian reservations:

Number 2, law and order has virtually vanished on all nine reservations. Crime is rampant, there’s cartel activity. I have met with people firsthand. They can’t even get the FBI to come out and investigate deaths on the reservation that are clearly at the hands of organized groups of people, likely cartel members. So, until the reservations are ready and willing to get serious about helping the state bring back law and order on the reservations, it’s going to be difficult, Meghan, sadly. I mean this is such a layered, complicated issue [Toby Doeden, interviewed by Meghan O’Brien, “How Governor Candidate Toby Doeden Says He’ll Phase Out Property Taxes,” South Dakota Searchlight, 2026.05.15, from transcript].

The tribes continue to say that the cartels aren’t a real problem in their jurisdictions:

The nine sovereign nations countered with denials and banned her from their lands. Chairman Boyd Gourneau of the Lower Brule Reservation remains confident there are no drug cartels.

“There’s no presence there,” Gourneau told Dakota News Now.

Just to the east, across the Missouri River on the Crow Creek Reservation, Chairman Peter Lengkeek answered questions about a cartel presence.

“No concerns, no cartels,” Lengkeek said. “Yeah, Crow Creek’s a little too rough for cartels anyway. They couldn’t handle it there” [Beth Warden, “Tribal Leaders Report Lower Drug Rates, No Cartels on Reservations,” KSFY, 2026.03.20].

Yeah, I don’t think Doeden could handle it on Crow Creek, either.

The kind of racist bushwa Doeden is now spewing got Kristi Noem banned by all nine tribes from South Dakota’s reservations; it’ll make it hard for Doeden to, as he says he wants to do, “bridge a relationship back between the nine reservations”. It ignores illegal drug peddling and abuse in all parts of South Dakota, white and red. It ignores the real trouble the tribes have maintaining law and order over sprawling, sparsely populated territory with inadequate federal support while the current administration diverts law enforcement resources to grabbing mostly harmless brown people at gas stations and parking lots in cities not on reservations.

The Rhoden Administration, in defending its latest expansion of its ICE-collaborative “Operation Prairie Thunder”, downplays the significance of cartel violence in South Dakota:

Drawing on his decades in law enforcement, [Public Safety Secretary Bob] Perry said Operation Prairie Thunder achieves crime reduction where local communities want it.

“Almost exclusively they talk about the crime in their neighborhood. They don’t care about Pablo Escobar the big drug dealer from Mexico. They’re worried about the people stealing tools and money, whatever, out of their vehicles or out of their trucks or out of their homes,” Perry said. “And I think we’ve found and demonstrated that this type of operation is the very type that affects that kind of crime. It’s addressing the criminal in the neighborhood” [Jackson Dircks, “Operation: Prairie Thunder Expanding, Though Some Fears in Communities Persist,” SDPB, 2026.05.19].

Contrary to his political posturing, Toby Doeden isn’t bringing anything new to Republican politics. Anti-tribal rhetoric, climate ostrich-head-sandery, magical thinking on taxes and economic growth—Doeden is talking just like the career politicians who’ve built their Republican careers on bluster and baloney.