Donald Trump on Thursday announced he was replacing Kristi Noem as the homeland security secretary, capping weeks of bipartisan complaints about her leadership after immigration agents killed two US citizens and reports emerged that she was involved in a personal relationship with a top deputy.
Noem’s firing was the first major personnel shake-up of Trump’s second term. The president made it public in a post on Truth Social, in which he said Markwayne Mullin, a Republican Oklahoma senator, would take over from Noem starting on 31 March – though Congress would need to vote to confirm the choice first. The secretary, who he said “has served us well, and has had numerous and spectacular results (especially on the Border!)”, would become special envoy for “the Shield of the Americas”, a security initiative Trump said he planned to announce over the weekend.
“It’s humbling,” Mullin said to reporters on Thursday. “Because it happened quick, I had to call my dad, and it’s just pretty humbling when you start thinking about it, a little kid from west Oklahoma getting to serve in the president’s cabinet. That is pretty neat.” Noem has yet to comment.
Democrats cheered Noem’s departure, with Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, saying at a press conference: “Good riddance. She was a disaster.”
But Jeffries said it would not change Democrats’ stance towards funding the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The department has been partly shutdown since mid-February after Senate Democrats blocked a spending measure because it did not include new rules governing the conduct of immigration agents, which they had been demanding in response to the shooting deaths of two US citizens in Minneapolis.
Jeffries said: “A change in personnel is not sufficient. We need a change in policy that has to be bold, dramatic, transformational and meaningful.”
Chuck Schumer, the top Senate Democrat, echoed Jeffries, saying: “I don’t trust any one person being in charge of this agency as long as Trump is president, given the policies he’s espoused, given how ICE has been structured. The rot is deep.”
A Republican former congresswoman and governor of South Dakota, Noem was considered a potential running mate for Trump as he sought re-election in 2024, but ultimately passed over after she admitted in a memoir to killing a dog she owned. The president instead nominated her to lead the DHS, which oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the border patrol and other agencies that took to the streets of major US cities during Trump’s second term to carry out his mass deportation agenda.
Noem became a public face of the crackdown, which ensnared immigrants with documentation and without, as well as US citizens, appearing regularly on conservative television networks as well as in promotional material on DHS social media accounts.
After federal agents deployed to Minneapolis killed Renee Good and then, weeks later, Alex Pretti, Noem accused both US citizens of being involved in “domestic terrorism”. But the allegations appeared to fly in the face of what was known about both’s participation in anti-ICE protests, and Democrats, along with some Republicans, called for Noem to resign after Pretti’s death.
Simultaneously, reports began to emerge of turmoil at the department and Noem engaging in a personal relationship with Corey Lewandowski, a former Trump campaign manager who is her senior adviser, despite both being married.
In February, the Wall Street Journal published a lengthy report into her leadership of the DHS that found Noem and Lewandowski had done little to obfuscate their personal relationship, while berating staff and administering polygraph tests to those they did not trust.
The pair had been traveling on a luxury 737 Max jet equipped with a private cabin, which the department has been seeking to acquire for around $70m for “high-profile deportations”. In one instance, Lewandowski fired a US Coast Guard pilot who left a blanket belonging to Noem on a plane, but then reinstated him because there was no one else to fly them back.
Democrats excoriated Noem when she appeared before the House and Senate judiciary committees in early March. She refused to retract her comments calling the US citizens killed in Minneapolis “domestic terrorists” while dismissing a question about whether she was having “sexual relations” with Lewandowski as “tabloid garbage”.
But even some Republicans signaled concerns with her leadership, with Louisiana senator John Kennedy questioning why the DHS gave $220m to a firm linked to Noem’s former spokesperson to produce advertisements in which the secretary was featured prominently.
Thom Tillis of North Carolina, one of the few Republicans who had called for Noem’s resignation, threatened to hold up Senate business if he did not get responses from her to a slew of questions, while accusing her of obstructing investigations by the department’s inspector general.
He also took her to task for killing both a dog and a goat, as she documented in her book, saying: “Those are bad decisions made in the heat of the moment, not unlike what happened in Minneapolis.”
