Donald Trump announced Thursday that he would replace Kristi Noem as Homeland Security secretary, capping weeks of bipartisan complaints about her leadership after immigration agents killed two U.S. citizens and reports emerged that she was involved in a personal relationship with a top lawmaker.
Noem’s firing was the first major staff shakeup of Trump’s second term. The president made it public in a post on Truth Social, in which he said Markwayne Mullin, a Republican senator from Oklahoma, would replace Noem effective March 31, although Congress would first have to vote to confirm the pick. The secretary, who he said “has served us well and has achieved numerous spectacular results (especially at the border!),” would become special envoy for “Shield of the Americas,” a security initiative that Trump said he planned to announce over the weekend.
“It’s humbling,” Mullin told reporters Thursday. “Because it happened quickly, I had to call my dad, and it’s pretty humbling when you start to think about it, that a little kid from western Oklahoma can serve in the president’s cabinet. That’s pretty cool.” Noem has not yet commented.
Democrats applauded Noem’s departure, with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries saying at a news conference: “Good riddance. She was a disaster.”
But Jeffries said he would not change Democrats’ stance on funding the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The department has been partially closed 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 American citizens in Minneapolis.
Jeffries said: “A personnel change is not enough. We need a policy change that has to be bold, dramatic, transformative and significant.”
Chuck Schumer, the Senate’s top Democrat, echoed Jeffries, saying, “I don’t trust any person to be in charge of this agency while Trump is president, given the policies he’s adopted, given the way ICE has been structured. The rot runs deep.”
Noem, a former Republican congresswoman and governor of South Dakota, was considered a possible running mate for Trump as he sought re-election in 2024, but was ultimately overlooked after she admitted in her memoir to killing a dog she owned. Instead, the president nominated her to lead DHS, which oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the border patrol and other agencies that took to the streets of major American cities during Trump’s second term to carry out his mass deportation agenda.
Noem became a public face of the crackdown, which ensnared documented and undocumented immigrants as well as American citizens, appearing regularly on conservative television networks as well as in promotional material on DHS social media accounts.
After federal agents deployed in Minneapolis killed Renee Good and then, weeks later, Alex Pretti, Noem accused both American citizens of being involved in “domestic terrorism.” But the allegations appeared to fly in the face of what was known about the pair’s involvement in anti-ICE protests, and Democrats, along with some Republicans, called for Noem to resign after Pretti’s death.
At the same time, reports began to emerge of turmoil in the department and that Noem entered into a personal relationship with Corey Lewandowski, a former Trump campaign manager who is her senior adviser, even though the two are married.
In February, the Wall Street Journal published an extensive report on her leadership at DHS that found that 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 couple was traveling on a luxury 737 Max jet equipped with a private cabin, which the department has been trying to acquire for about $70 million for “high-profile deportations.” In one case, Lewandowski fired a U.S. Coast Guard pilot who left a blanket belonging to Noem on a plane, but then reinstated him because there was no one else to take them back.
Democrats criticized Noem when she appeared before the House and Senate judiciary committees in early March. He refused to retract his comments calling the American citizens killed in Minneapolis “domestic terrorists” and dismissed a question about whether he was having “sexual relations” with Lewandowski as “sensational garbage.”
But even some Republicans expressed concern about her leadership, with Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy questioning why DHS gave $220 million to a company linked to Noem’s former spokesman to produce ads in which the secretary featured prominently.
Thom Tillis of North Carolina, one of the few Republicans who had called for Noem to resign, threatened to delay Senate business if he did not get answers from her to a series of questions, while accusing her of obstructing investigations by the department’s inspector general.
He also chastised her 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.”
