Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem — one of the Trump administration’s most colorful characters, mocked as “Concentration Camp Barbie” by the president’s foes — was dismissed by President Trump on Thursday. This follows widely reported rumors about Noem’s personal life and a controversial wave of paramilitary-style attacks on U.S. cities unleashed by her department, the incarceration and deportation of thousands of immigrants and multiple killings of civilians, including U.S. citizens, by officers in agencies under Noem’s purview.
According to a Truth Social post from Trump early on Thursday afternoon, Noem will be replaced at DHS by Sen. Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla., as of March 31. Mullin is a vigorous supporter of Trump and the MAGA movement, and his vacated U.S. Senate seat is likely to remain in Republican hands.
Earlier this week, Noem faced a humiliating and highly unusual personal grilling before judiciary committees in both the House and Senate, as Democratic members asked embarrassing questions about her personal life, including Noem’s alleged relationship with former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, who has been serving as an unpaid special government employee under this administration. Noem did not directly deny an affair with Lewandowski in response to repeated questioning, as her husband sat behind her in the committee chamber.
“I think the ridiculousness of this and the tabloids that you are quoting and referencing are insane,” Noem said. “This is a thing I have refuted for years.”
She was also pressed by members of Congress over a $220 million ad campaign from the department that prominently featured her, as well as contracts agreed by the department that appeared to be non-competitive, in violation of government statutes. agreed to with only limited competition between contractors.
In Trump’s Truth Social post, the president said Noem “has served us well, and has had numerous and spectacular results” but said she was being moved to a newly invented position as “Special Envoy for The Shield of the Americas, our new Security Initiative in the Western Hemisphere,” to be announced this weekend. He thanked Noem “for her service at ‘Homeland.’”
Formerly known as the avidly pro-Trump governor of South Dakota, Noem was tapped lead DHS shortly after the 2024 election, and now becomes by far the most prominent Trump Cabinet official ousted during the second term. She was reportedly considered as a possible running mate on Trump’s 2024 ticket, though she was passed over in favor of JD Vance, then a newly-elected Ohio senator, after Noem published a book in which she boasted about shooting a poorly-behaved family dog.
Noem led DHS through the first year of Trump’s second term in office, overseeing both Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection as the agencies saw an unprecedented surge in funding and resources, growing to become an ever-present force in American life. Under Noem’s leadership, the agencies adopted wearing masks to conceal their identities, while rushing to complete quotas imposed on them, with the administration demanding 3,000 deportations a day.
Earlier this year, Noem sought to pin ICE and CBP’s violent crackdown in Minneapolis on White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, perhaps Trump’s closest adviser. A source told Axios that Noem had said, “Everything I’ve done, I’ve done at the direction of the president and Stephen.”
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U.S. public opinion has largely turned against Trump’s immigration enforcement policy, and coupled with the rumors about Noem’s private life, that apparently made her position untenable. Immigration was previously understood as one of Trump’s strongest issues in public polling, most Americans now disapprove of the administration’s handling of the issue. Two prominent GOP senators, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, publicly turned against Noem on Jan. 27, asking the president to fire her.
The GOP’s mass deportation policy came to a head in Minneapolis after officers under the DHS killed two American citizens within a two-week period in January, first Renee Nicole Good, a mother and Minneapolis resident, and later Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse working at the Minneapolis Veterans Affairs hospital. Prior to these killings, DHS employees had killed six people as part of their immigration crackdown, though it was the videos and the nature of the killings in Minneapolis that escalated the political fallout.
Following the killing of Pretti, who was tackled by a group of officers and shot numerous times by two different officers, congressional Republicans turning on Noem as a scapegoat, along with CBP’s former “commander at large,” Gregory Bovino, whose title was dissolved after the killings. Bovino’s apparent demotion came after he made demonstrably false claims that Pretti was aiming to kill federal agents. “This looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement,” Bovino said.
Tom Homan, Trump’s “border czar,” was sent to Minneapolis to assume command of operations there, vowing to continue the deadly operation, while promising that it would be “safer.”
“What we’ve been working on is making this operation safer, more efficient, by the book,” Homan said at a Jan. 29 press conference. “The mission is going to improve because of the changes we’re making internally.” None of these changes, it appears, was enough to save Kristi Noem’s job.
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