Internal Dhs Messages Confirm Lewandowski’s Outsize Power At The Department

Internal communications from the Department of Homeland Security shed new light on the amount of executive authority former Secretary Kristi Noem handed to her senior adviser Corey Lewandowski, empowering the Trump 2016 campaign manager to make wide-ranging decisions on the daily course of immigration enforcement.

Emails and Signal messages among top DHS officials between March and August 2025 show that Lewandowski was part of sensitive discussions about the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. These included planning for deportations of unauthorized immigrants to third countries and the legal dispute over the deportation of Kilmar Ábrego García to El Salvador.

The messages were obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request by American Oversight, a liberal-leaning watchdog group, and shared with POLITICO.

Lewandowski was at the department between January 2025 and March 2026 but without any official role, instead serving as a special government employee — an unpaid role in which an outside expert can temporarily support government work as an adviser. Both Democrats and some Republicans have previously argued that Noem had outsourced important decisions to him that should have been the job of the secretary.

Earlier this year, while Noem was still in office, media reports alleged that Noem had a romantic relationship with Lewandowski, prompting House Democrats to question her about it in hearings.

Lewandowski and Noem have previously denied those allegations. Lewandowski declined to comment for this story. A representative for Noem did not respond to a request for comment. DHS declined to comment.

Much of the content of the messages was redacted by DHS, which cited statutory provisions that allow it to keep interagency coordination communications private. But the unredacted parts of the messages showed that senior officials gave considerable and unusual deference to Lewandowski, given his lack of formal executive role at the department.

In one July 15, 2025, exchange, Lewandowski praised deportation efforts. Then-acting ICE Director Todd Lyons responded saying that “they are only going to get better sir!”

DHS officials treated Lewandowski in many ways as an equal to Noem. In one email, Deputy Homeland Security Secretary Troy Edgar directed his top aide, Clark Barrow, to come up with a few items to report up to “S1 and Corey.” S1 was shorthand in department communications for Noem.

Messages also show that Lewandowski often received the same emailed high-level briefings as Edgar and Noem — in one instance about a deportation case that DHS leadership was closely watching, in another about operations in Djibouti.

The disclosure of the messages comes as House and Senate Democrats, gearing up to retake control of Congress in January, have homed in on Lewandowski and Noem as major targets for investigations into the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. And they raise new questions about the sheer power that Lewandowski exerted over the department and the extent to which he acted on behalf of Noem without her input.

Absent in many of the exchanges was Noem, who only chimed in sporadically in exchanges dominated by Lewandowski. Noem in one exchange appeared to be alarmed when Edgar mentioned that officials who worked in the DHS press office helped him on an opinion piece, confusing one official with another, and later said she “confirmed with Corey that it’s not the same” person.

The other officials in the messages included then-DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin, then-ICE Deputy Director Madison Sheahan and then-DHS senior official Joseph Mazzara. All three regularly gave status updates about department projects to these Signal chats where Lewandowski was involved.

McLaughlin did not discuss Lewandowski’s role when reached for comment, but said the messages showed her executing the tasks associated with her job.

Lyons and Sheahan did not respond to requests for comment.

The exchanges also indicate that senior DHS officials approached the work of deportations with particular glee. At one point, when Lyons updated his fellow officials about the success of a third-country deportation to South Sudan, Lewandowski wrote back: “Praise Jesus.” An exchange a week later saw Lewandowski proclaim “I love deportations.”

American Oversight argues the documents should prompt additional scrutiny of DHS.

“As some of the officials involved still hold positions of power at DHS, and legal challenges to third party removals are still being litigated, Congress has a duty to investigate — to demand answers, obtain every record of how these decisions were made, and put those officials under oath,” said American Oversight Executive Director Chioma Chukwu.