The immigration debate in the USA and in other countries has quickly polarised between those who see immigrants as pioneers, walking in the footsteps of all those who settled the lands during the period of colonialisation and their descendants (which is almost everyone except surviving indigenous people), and subhuman invaders who flood the country, take the good jobs, and rape and kill the innocent.
President Trump has referred to undocumented immigrants as being criminals and rapists (although he said some might be “good people”), who come from:
“… jails, prisons, from mental institutions, insane asylums. You know insane asylums. That’s ‘Silence of the Lambs’ stuff. Hannibal Lecter…”
So we waited eagerly (or perhaps apprehensively) to meet these undocumented Hannibals. Now, the Homeland Security Secretary, Kristi Noem, has described how federal agents nabbed a purported cannibal illegal migrant who started to eat his own arms during a deportation flight.
On July 1 2025, Noem was visiting the “Alligator Alcatraz” deportation camp in the South Florida Everglades alongside President Trump. This is a the detention centre located about 40 miles west of Miami and surrounded by alligator- and python-infested swampland.
At a press conference, she said:
“The other day I was talking to some Marshals that had been partnering with ICE. They said that they had detained a cannibal and put him on a plane to take him home and while they had him in his seat, he started to eat himself, and they had to get him off and get him medical attention.
These are the kind of deranged individuals that are on our streets in America that we’re trying to target and get out of our country because they are so deranged, they don’t belong here. They shouldn’t be walking the streets with our children, and they shouldn’t be living in the communities with our families who just want to grow up, go to [their] job, raise their children to grow up and get a job, and to live the American dream….
We are going after murderers and rapists and traffickers and drug dealers and getting them off the streets and getting them out of this country.”
Hard to know what to make of this, since the Department of Homeland Security could not immediately provide corroborating details of any case to match Noem’s story. Was this person a cannibal, and if so, who did he eat? Why did he chew on himself? Is airline food that bad?
The story of human evolution: get eaten, or eat ourselves.
The Cannibal Guy 