Splinter: Meet Tricia McLaughlin, Mouthpiece for the Very Worst Trump Administration Atrocities

If you’ve spent any time at all reading news stories in the last year on the steady ramp-up of Donald Trump and Kristi Noem’s terror campaign against immigrants (and U.S. citizens) that is being conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), then there’s another name you’ve no doubt come across over and over again, even if you’ve never taken particular notice of it: Tricia McLaughlin. Such is the role of a departmental spokesperson–you’re always present, but never the star of the show. In many ways, McLaughlin seems to be like any other hanger-on who drifted into the orbit of MAGA and found that it presented unique routes to both infamy and profit. But even in comparison to the likes of administration mouthpiece Karoline Leavitt, McLaughlin’s task at the Department of Homeland Security is so closely attuned to the very worst excesses and abuses of the second Trump administration that her collective statements, issued over the course of 2025 and into 2026, can’t help but make your skin crawl. This is someone who has truly and completely sold their soul, in order to become the avatar of the very worst propaganda and lies that the administration has to offer on any given day. Oh, and she flies in private jets too, but we’ll get to that.

McLaughlin’s official title is Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at DHS, which it notes involves overseeing the public outreach of the cabinet-level department, “including its media, digital, strategic and crisis communication efforts, and serves as the principal advisor to Secretary Noem on all external and internal communications.” Especially notable are those “crisis communication efforts,” because McLaughlin’s name is perpetually the first quoted one that you’ll find in any story about ICE or DHS malfeasance–even when there’s ample evidence that the administration is lying through its teeth. McLaughlin has been exceedingly successful at making sure that “both sides” accounts are present in practically any piece referencing ICE, regardless of whether evidence such as video exists to completely invalidate whatever she may be saying at the time.

The younger 30-something certainly looks the part for a prominent Trump administration PR station, with her cascading blonde hair and seeming willingness to say anything she’s told, but she’s already taken an interestingly circuitous route to get here, with a career filled with bouncing from one gig to another. She was a congressional intern in college, before working at a Macy’s and as an intern on Chuck Todd’s MSNBC show. She then apparently somehow spent a year at J.P. Morgan as a financial analyst despite her college study having been in government and public relations, before managing media at the U.S. Treasury Department and a 7-month gig as “Chief of Staff to the U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Nuclear Arms Control” (???) during the first Trump admin, which she then ditched to become the communications director for the Ohio Republican Party. That led her to become the director of communications for Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, and finally into the embrace of the highly successful presidential campaign of Vivek Ramaswamy, where she was apparently the very first person Vivek hired. All of this information is available on McLaughlin’s publicly available LinkedIn account, which amusingly has never been updated in her DHS days–according to it, her employer is still “Vivek 2024.”

On any given day through 2025, however, McLaughlin’s job was pretty clearly to shovel bullshit away from whatever topic was currently drawing the most flak. She once compared the mistakenly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia to Osama Bin Laden. She has weighed in many times on topics such as the notorious, leaky and mosquito-ridden immigrant detention facility in the Florida swamp known as Alligator Alcatraz, often responding to allegations of abuse or mistreatment, such as numerous accounts from detainees and Amnesty International that people are being kept in metal 2×2 boxes in the Florida sun. I’d like for you to stop for a moment, and imagine having a job where you have to write statements such as “No feces are overflowing from the toilets,” or “incinerators are not being used for nefarious purposes” to the media. McLaughlin has also responded to stories about the accounts of individual detainees such as Rafael Collado, who told family that he was kept in a chain-link cage for a month, unsure of if it was day or night, or even what day it was, with no idea of why he was detained or where he would be sent. The DHS spokeswoman called Collado (who was previously convicted of homicide and served a 17-year prison sentence) a “barbaric criminal,” and insisted “the media is peddling a false sob story of a convicted murderer.”

Literally anything Noem, Tricia McLaughlin, or ICE says needs to be contextualized with the fact that they lie constantly and shamelessley

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— Leah Greenberg ❌👑 (@leahgreenberg.bsky.social) Jan 7, 2026 at 2:49 PM

McLaughlin has referred to immigrants as “animals,” among other things. An average DHS press release is crawling with her incendiary language. All of two days ago, she was quoted with the following: “Another day, another round of pedophiles, violent thugs, and human traffickers removed from American communities. Under President Trump and Secretary Noem, ICE is targeting and removing the WORST OF THE WORST criminal illegal aliens terrorizing American families.”

Her job likewise involves handwaving cases where DHS malfeasance is alleged, sweeping them under the rug to be buried by mountains of other outrages. A good example is the case of Los Angeles resident Vicente Ventura Aguilar, a Mexican national who had lived and worked in the U.S. for 17 years as a day laborer before friends and neighbors attest that he was detained by ICE in a raid in early October of 2025. While in ICE custody, he reportedly suffered some kind of medical episode according to an acquaintance who was also detained and deported, and that was the last that anyone has seen or known the whereabouts of Vicente Ventura Aguilar. Just over three months later, he’s still missing. McLaughlin, replying to a tragically minor media hubbub about the case that has long since withered away, simply denied that Ventura Aguilar had ever been detained by ICE because he wasn’t in the Online Detainee Locator System, despite the fact that numerous witnesses both at the scene and in ICE custody alongside Ventura Aguilar attested that he was there.

Is it possible that McLaughlin is correct in a case like that, and that this man disappeared in some other way and never contacted his family? Theoretically, sure, but it seems unnecessary to go down that road when we already have copious evidence that Tricia McLaughlin is a prodigious liar, one who has now turned it into a career. Consider a few specific examples.

In October, a U.S. citizen in Chicago named Debbie Brockman was arrested by ICE agents as she walked to work, allegedly for being involved in the efforts of “agitators” to impede the agents. In the same incident, an ICE agent apparently hit another person’s vehicle with their car. McLaughlin’s statement representing DHS was as follows: “U.S. Border Patrol was conducting immigration enforcement operations and when several violent agitators used their vehicles to block in agents in an effort to impede and assault federal officers. In fear of public safety and of law enforcement, officers used their service vehicle to strike a suspect’s vehicle and create an opening. As agents were driving, Deborah Brockman, a U.S. citizen, threw objects at Border Patrol’s car and she was placed under arrest for assault on a federal law enforcement officer.”

In bystander videos, however, one can see that Brockman had already been detained when the incident occurred–she was later released by the agents with no charges. McLaughlin, naturally, never retracted or apologized for her incorrect claims about Brockman, while Border Patrol “Commander-at-Large” and Nazi fashion enthusiast Gregory Bovino followed her lead and took the opportunity to claim on Twitter that Brockman had committed a felony, despite the fact that ICE had released her a day prior without filing any charges. It was McLaughlin that set the tone for manufacturing a criminal narrative against a U.S. citizen; even one they didn’t intend to charge or prosecute, because in the Trump administration you have to be 100% attack at all times.

It’s a very complicated world, and there’s a lot of grey rather than black or white, so it’s comforting to know with certainty that if Tricia McLaughlin says something you can know, with confidence, it’s false.

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— We’re Going To Keep The Popehat (@kenwhite.bsky.social) Jan 7, 2026 at 1:05 PM

Her main task seems to be to just spew incorrect information out into the social media hellscape, so it can take root and spread on its own via conservative influencers, talking heads and bots–look at the case, for instance, where she claimed on Twitter that a video of a Chicago teenager being violently arrested by ICE was actually unrelated footage “from a year ago,” and that “this isn’t even ICE.” Both were demonstrably lies, but when this became clear, did McLaughlin go back and delete the old, incorrect tweet? Of course not; doing so would be admitting on some small level a minuscule amount of culpability and fallibility. And as we know, Donald Trump’s divine mandate flows to all whom his administration employs. They cannot be incorrect.

With that in mind, you just know that McLaughlin was going to have to earn her pay this week, in the wake of the killing of Minneapolis resident and U.S. citizen Renee Nicole Good by ICE, a case that has already become a lightning rod for opposition to the Trump administration’s deadly immigration tactics. She was tasked with leading the way in crafting the narrative that the 37-year-old mother of three had acted with a suicidal intent to kill ICE agents, and thus “weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them.” She helpfully added that “the ICE officers who were hurt are expected to make full recoveries,” which is impressive considering the extent of their presumptive maiming as Good’s car drove past them as she was being shot to death, striking no one.

Just a few days before Good’s killing, McLaughlin–who mostly hangs out on Twitter, intercepting anti-DHS stories in the right-wing echo chamber–made a post to her rarely updated Instagram account. Amid a slideshow of glamorizing images and seemingly random memes, there’s a photo of McLaughlin and some other women–possibly family?–seated in a private jet, clutching expensive handbags.

It’s the kind of tacky prosperity flex that is celebrated by the MAGA culture and the online right, but it also presumably ties back to a still-recent story about Trump’s administration that, like so many others, would have been a bombshell, career-ending reveal of corruption at any prior point in U.S. history. And guess who features prominently in it?

A searing November investigatory piece by ProPublica revealed that the DHS hadn’t revealed all of the beneficiaries of a $220 million, taxpayer-funded ad campaign designed to sell the Trump admin’s immigration platform. The one they forgot to mention in public documents? That would be The Strategy Group, a PR/ad agency whose CEO is one Ben Yoho–Tricia McLaughlin’s husband since August of this year, when the pair married. Yoho had been brought into Kristi Noem’s 2022 gubernatorial campaign as an ad man by none other than sex pest Corey Lewandowski, and has benefited from his association with her ever since, being awarded public money contracts in South Dakota, allegedly at Noem’s own urging. For the massive, $200 million-plus DHS ad campaign, meanwhile, Noem and co. invoked a declared “national emergency” at the border as justification for skipping the mandated competitive bidding process, which is designed to prevent waste and corruption.

McLaughlin’s advertiser husband was, in effect, simply handed a giant sack of taxpayer dollars, according to ProPublica’s investigation. And ah, in a fortuitous coincidence, the private jet photos begin to show up on McLaughlin’s social media in the next few months afterward. A particularly amusing quote in the piece from a federal contract law expert refers to it as “Corrupt, is the word,” and says that “Hiding your friends as subcontractors is like playing hide the salami with the taxpayer.”

There’s no shortage of figures you could nominate as the most reprehensible personalities of the second Trump administration. I certainly wouldn’t begrudge anyone casting their support behind the likes of Stephen Miller, what with his proudly white nationalistic pedigree attempting to push the presidency in ever-more-overtly racist directions. But I think at the end of the day there’s something to be said for the sheer, mercenary disregard for truth or harm that someone like Tricia McLaughlin seems to possess, and the way that disregard has been wielded to hurt random, average Americans, when it’s not enriching her. This is someone who doesn’t even care the slightest bit about the very concept of objective truth, who saw an opportunity to graft herself on to the MAGA pipeline to prosperity and didn’t hesitate for a moment to jump all over it. It wouldn’t surprise me one bit, in fact, to find out that McLaughlin doesn’t believe in or genuinely support Donald Trump, Kristi Noem or anyone else in the administration even a little bit–she strikes me as simply the perfectly calculating type of person who would align herself with whatever movement is in power, to provide spin and damage control wherever it’s needed, as long as the paychecks kept flowing. And there are few types of people more ultimately frightening than that.