Tricia McLaughlin’s Top Five Lies

The outgoing Homeland Security flack’s pattern of mendacity.

(Composite / Photos: DHS / Shutterstock)

TRICIA MCLAUGHLIN, the top Department of Homeland Security spokesperson who over the past year became a prominent apologist for the Trump administration’s program of mass deportation, is leaving her post. After the news broke on Tuesday morning, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem bid McLaughlin farewell on X and expressed gratitude for her “exceptional dedication, tenacity, and professionalism.”

Tenacious is a good word for McLaughlin, who, Politico reports, often made as many as five media appearances per day to defend the administration’s policies. Over the course of these many media hits, and across countless tweets quoted in news reports—often following horrifying tragedies perpetrated by DHS agents—McLaughlin earned a reputation for extraordinary, shameless lying.

To mark the occasion of her departure, here are five of the most heinous lies McLaughlin told during her tenure at DHS.

Lie #1: Alex Pretti wanted to “massacre law enforcement” when federal agents killed him.

DHS’s first statement on the killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, widely quoted in the media, reportedly came from McLaughlin; it said Pretti “approached US Border Patrol officers with a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun.” The statement was reposted to the DHS account on X along with a photo of the firearm. Officers tried to disarm Pretti, the statement said, and when he “violently resisted,” one of them “fired defensive shots.” “This looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement,” the statement said.

Video taken from numerous angles clearly and quickly disproved most of what the statement either alleged or insinuated about the shooting: Pretti, a lawful gun owner, never brandished his weapon at officers prior to being violently thrown to the ground, disarmed, and shot to death by two agents, since identified as Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez.

Yet in press conferences and public statements following the tragedy, numerous officials, including Secretary Noem and Border Patrol Commander-at-Large Greg Bovinio, repeated verbatim the statement’s claim that Pretti intended to inflict “maximum damage” on officers. Noem added that Pretti was a “domestic terrorist,” a characterization Stephen Miller also affirmed. Miller then put his own further spin on things, describing Pretti as a “would-be assassin,” an assertion that Trump disputed and Miller later walked back, claiming he had based it on bad information from CBP agents at the scene.

Although McLaughlin helped build this false and slanderous narrative that even hardliners like Miller have abandoned, she herself has refused to renounce her office’s extreme—and baseless—claims about Pretti.

Lie #2: Renee Good committed an act of “domestic terrorism.”

Shortly after the killing of Renee Good, McLaughlin issued a statement from her personal X account: “ICE officers in Minneapolis were conducting targeted operations when rioters began blocking ICE officers and one of these violent rioters weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them—an act of domestic terrorism.”

As in the statement that would follow Pretti’s killing, McLaughlin alluded to a federal agent who, “fearing for his life [and] the lives of his fellow law enforcement . . . fired defensive shots” at the hostile driver. The driver was killed, and although multiple “ICE officers . . . were hurt,” they were fortunately “expected to make full recoveries.” As in Pretti’s case, video taken by bystanders from a variety of angles would clearly show that McLaughlin’s account of the situation was wrong. But that didn’t stop the “domestic terrorism” narrative from rapidly spreading across the MAGAverse before many of its proponents would have even seen any of the video disproving it.

In the immediate aftermath of Good’s killing, The Bulwark’s national political reporter Andrew Egger offered a clarifying assessment of McLaughlin’s comms strategy: “By putting forward an alternate, fictional account of what happened in Minneapolis yesterday—and doing so before the footage from bystanders without preexisting social-media megaphones had a chance to pick up traction—McLaughlin gave the MAGA infotainment machine something important: a unified spin strategy, ready to be deployed at scale and at speed.”

And it worked. Eager to counterprogram, prominent MAGA influencers “uncritically parroted McLaughlin’s story to their enormous audiences,” Egger wrote.

And just as in the case of the Pretti killing, McLaughlin refused to give up her lies. When CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked her about the administration’s repeated characterization of Renee Good as a domestic terrorist, calling it “outrageous,” McLaughlin doubled down, saying, “It was an act of domestic terrorism. In no way is that outrageous.”

Lie #3: “Children are not being zip-tied” during immigration enforcement raids.

In response to a prompt from Fox host Maria Bartiromo about an Illinois church’s nativity scene depicting baby Jesus zip-tied by ICE agents, McLaughlin claimed in December 2025 that “children are not being zip-tied. This is, again, another disgusting smear.”

However, during an FBI-led law enforcement operation in Idaho in October, in which over a hundred people were detained by ICE, a photo obtained by local news and passed along to the FBI reportedly showed a 14-year-old U.S. citizen in zip ties.

In response, McLaughlin gave the Idaho Capital Sun a statement in which she claimed that “ICE didn’t zip tie, restrain or arrest any children.”

Fast-forward to last week, when CBS reported that “children as young as 14” had been “zip-tied and questioned about their immigration status” during the Idaho raid in October. The 14-year-old U.S. citizen shared photos with reporters of bruising from the restraints on her wrists.

“ICE didn’t zip tie, restrain, or arrest any children,” McLaughlin repeated in a statement to CBS. “ICE does not zip tie or handcuff children. This is garbage rhetoric contributing to our officers facing a 1,300% increase in assaults against them and an 8,000% increase in death threats.”

It’s possible that McLaughlin is technically correct here: The Idaho operation was a collaborative affair between multiple federal and local agencies, so there is a chance that the men in masks and camo who rounded up the children and families that day were not from ICE, even though ICE made the arrests. But even if children were being zip-tied by FBI agents or local law enforcement officers or some other DHS personnel instead of ICE during this particular raid, it’s not as though they are being spared from the cruelty of the administration’s mass deportation efforts. Children like 5-year-old Liam Ramos have allegedly been used by DHS agents as bait to capture other family members.¹ Of course, McLaughlin has denied that claim, too.

Lie #4: DHS is “focused on getting the worst of the worst out of this country.”

McLaughlin has said the administration’s mass-deportion effort is focused on getting the “worst of the worst out of this country”—rapists, murderers, terrorists, gang members, and so forth. If federal agents are targeting worksites, that’s just because those places are where they “find the worst of the worst.”

This core claim, that DHS is prioritizing removing violent criminal offenders, is blatantly false.

Of people booked into ICE custody since October 1, 2025, 73 percent had no criminal conviction, and only 8 percent had a violent or property criminal conviction, according to an analysis by the Cato Institute. As ICE’s own published detention numbers make clear, the mass deportations ramp-up has depended on arresting more and more people who have no criminal record.

Lie #5: “We’re making sure we’re using U.S. taxpayer dollars well.”

McLaughlin made this claim during an interview on Fox News about DHS painting the border wall black.

Trump asked that they do it. The going theory was apparently that in addition to mitigating rust issues, the new hue would make the wall hot to the touch, preventing people from climbing it. That makes a lot of sense—so long as you completely discount the existence of gloves, ladders, and the nighttime.

The black-paint boondoggle illustrates what sorts of purposes the administration is finding for our taxes. Responsible stewardship of the public purse, it is not. As ProPublica reported, DHS spent much of last year committing upwards of $200 million to a massive ad campaign, contracts for which were awarded outside of normal competitive bidding processes. Noem authorized the U.S. Coast Guard to spend $200 million of taxpayer money on a pair of luxury Gulfstream G700 private jets during last fall’s government shutdown.

If this is what responsible stewardship of taxpayer dollars looks like, what would irresponsible stewardship entail?

1. You can read more about Liam’s story and the stories of other children caught up in the gears of Trump’s deportation machine in Huddled Masses, The Bulwark’s immigration-focused newsletter by Adrian Carrasquillo.