San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie has denied outgoing Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s claim that the pair “talk quite often,” letting it be known that, on the contrary, he had not spoken to her in four months.
Noem was fired by President Donald Trump on Thursday, who announced that she would be replaced by Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin and appointed her Special Envoy to the newly-created Shield of the Americas initiative.
The secretary herself was in Nashville, Tennessee, when the news broke, attending the Sergeant Benevolent Association Major Cities Conference at the Grand Hyatt Hotel.
At that event, she told Chris Galligan, San Francisco Police Officers Association Vice President, that Lurie “works with us very well” and had had “great conversations” with her.
“You maybe have some challenges in San Francisco just because of your state laws and local laws,” Noem told Galligan.
“Although you’ve got a mayor that works with us very well. He probably doesn’t want me to talk about it a lot, actually. But he has been cooperative and we have great conversations and talk quite often.”
However, a San Francisco City Hall source subsequently told Mission Local that the secretary’s comments were inaccurate.
That source said Lurie last spoke to the administration when Trump called him on October 22 to discuss moving back a planned ICE deployment to the Bay Area.
Lurie has been criticized locally for declining to release records of his call with the president, but his diplomatic efforts prevented the liberal city from experiencing an influx of federal immigration agents, a development that led to violent clashes and bitter protests nationwide.
Trump credited the mayor last fall with asking him “very nicely” to refrain from wading into San Francisco, also saying on Truth Social that two “friends of mine,” billionaire CEOs Jensen Huang of Nvidia and Marc Benioff of Salesforce, had played a role in talking him down from signing off on another contentious mission.
Noem endured a torrid 13-month tenure as the public face of Trump’s illegal immigration crackdown, which came to a head with the disastrous Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota, which saw the fatal shooting of two protesters, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, in street confrontations with federal agents.
The secretary called both victims “domestic terrorists” in defense of her forces, stoking widespread anger, and thereafter fought to retain her position, holding crisis talks with the president in the Oval Office.
She was subsequently hit by accusations about the “chaotic” state of her department, her excessive media focus, and alleged extramarital affair with top adviser Corey Lewandowski, which both parties vehemently denied.
With Trump’s patience running short, she suffered a nightmarish brace of appearances before the House and Senate Judiciary Committees this week, during which the president was reportedly infuriated by her claim that he had known in advance about a lavish DHS advertising campaign in which she was featured prominently.
“I never knew anything about it,” he told Reuters Thursday, signalling the end for an official doomed to be forever remembered for bragging about shooting dead a puppy she had failed to train.
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