US President Trump fired Kristi Noem as homeland security secretary on Thursday and announced plans to replace her with Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma, concluding a long-building frustration with Ms. Noem that had come to a head this week with her grilling by Republicans at congressional hearings,
The New York Times reports.
Mr. Trump announced the change on social media, along with a new, and previously nonexistent, role for Ms. Noem inside the administration: special envoy for the Shield of the Americas, which he said would be a new security initiative for the Western Hemisphere.
Mr. Trump is close with Mr. Mullin, a Republican, and speaks with him regularly. Mr. Mullin said that Ms. Noem had “done the best that she could do under the circumstances,” but that he hoped to learn from her tenure and “build off things that didn’t quite go as planned.” Mr. Trump said Ms. Noem would remain in her current role until March 31. She thanked him in her own social media post.
The immediate catalyst for Ms. Noem’s firing appeared to be her answers during two congressional hearings this week, particularly her under-threat-of-perjury statements that Mr. Trump had approved of tens of millions of dollars of government ads in which she was prominently featured. Mr. Trump denied that to Reuters on Thursday, saying, “I never knew anything about it.”
Mr. Trump was shown clips of her answers before a Senate panel and was angry that she blamed him for the contentious spots, according to a person with knowledge of what happened who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. The ads were part of a $200 million-plus government-funded campaign that included a subcontractor run by the husband of Ms. Noem’s now-former spokeswoman, Tricia McLaughlin.
The uproar over the ads came as recent Wall Street Journal articles detailed Ms. Noem’s spending decisions — on private jets, including one with a bedroom and only 18 seats that she said would be used for migrant flights — and an inspector general told Congress that she had “systematically obstructed” his office’s work.
But Ms. Noem had presided over a long string of controversies and a department with low morale. The makings of her ouster had been apparent for months. Her demise became an open question amid a national outcry prompted by bystander videos of the killing of Alex Pretti, a registered nurse protesting immigration crackdowns in Minneapolis, by federal immigration agents on Jan. 24.
Her response to his death called attention to the Trump administration’s increasingly violent tactics with people protesting the immigration efforts, and brought to the forefront questions about Ms. Noem’s leadership of the department, which oversees everything from cybersecurity to natural disaster response to the Secret Service.
Ms. Noem, who was an aggressive voice for the administration’s immigration crackdowns, worked closely with Stephen Miller, one of Mr. Trump’s top advisers and the architect of his restrictionist immigration policies. She is only the second high-level official to be ousted — and the first cabinet member — in Mr. Trump’s second term.
