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MEXICO CITY — The Mexican Tourism Ministry announced Monday that it has hired former U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem as its new Director of International Outreach, ending a nationwide search that officials said took “considerably less time than expected.”

“For years, Kristi Noem could not stop talking about Mexico,” said Tourism Minister Josefina Rodríguez. “She mentioned us in every speech, every ad, every debate. No one in American public life has kept our name in front of more eyeballs, completely for free, for longer. We felt we owed her a salary.”

Rodríguez added that the ministry had considered other candidates but ultimately concluded that hiring “the woman who spent US $220 million in federal funds just to put her own face on television” was, from a marketing standpoint, an asset rather than a liability.

The ministry has already commissioned a billboard campaign featuring Noem on horseback against an Oaxacan sunset with the tagline: “So great, even I had to admit it.”

“We tested forty slogans,” said Rodríguez. “That one performed best with the 45-to-65 American conservative demographic. Which is, coincidentally, exactly who we are trying to get to book an all-inclusive.”

When asked whether hiring the architect of mass deportations sent a complicated message, Rodríguez paused.

“She is very recognizable,” she said. “And the flights from Sioux Falls are very affordable.”
Noem, reached by phone from Cabo San Lucas, called the appointment “a natural evolution” and said she looked forward to telling “the other side of the story” about a country she described as having “far fewer cartels than I previously indicated, publicly, many times.”

At press time, the Mexican government had quietly added Noem’s DHS tenure to her official biography under the heading “Extensive Regional Experience.”

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