On Friday, the second-term governor spent part of a 51-minute press conference in Pierre lamenting the seven prior banishment measures and continued to emphasize her claim that Mexican cartels are using South Dakota’s Indian lands as “safe havens” to distribute drugs in the state.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2024/05/17/kristi-noem-cartels-use-south-dakota-indian-reservations-as-haven-for-drug-trafficking/73733443007/
While there is some cartel activity in South Dakota according to the DEA (like in every state), the specific violence and crimes she is alluding to doesn’t seem to have a specific reference base or specific numbers.
The DEA info and a statement from a South Dakota native American sheriff are interesting to read.
There’s a lot of crime on reservations because there’s a lot of poverty on reservations. I wonder if the U.S. government she’s proud to be a part of has anything to do with that?
I wonder what the DEA document reads. Based on this second article shared though, it seems South Dakota has much much less of a problem respectively than other states. It seems very odd that the governor’s focusing so much on it.
The cartel running in the States has been a problem for decades, her vague, open-ended complaints without proposed solutions seem largely political.
Sending a few more cops into the forest or deserts to search for Mexican cartel operations is entirely futile and not at all cost effective in the “war on drugs”, but people are afraid of foreigners and afraid of drugs that they aren’t educated about, so it’s an easy topic to bang the drum about.
Republicans have been scaring people about drugs for 50 years in order to get elected, without making an iota of headway solving the problem.
You can download and read the DEAs NDTA for 2024 here. https://www.dea.gov/press-releases/2024/05/09/dea-releases-2024-national-drug-threat-assessment