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Kristi Noem is on her way out as the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. It is long overdue, and it should mean that DHS will be more effective and more serious under the new leadership of Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK).
Noem was always a poor pick for a position that was going to be crucial to President Donald Trump’s agenda. Democrats were always going to make DHS their top target as Trump pursued widespread deportations. That meant his DHS secretary would need to be able to weather storms.
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Noem proved she was incapable of that while serving as the governor of South Dakota. With Noem’s encouragement, the South Dakota legislature passed a bill restricting boys and men in girls’ and women’s sports, only for Noem to back out at the last moment and veto it in fear of the NCAA. Noem showed in that moment that she was willing to back down from a popular position under almost no pressure, which would not bode well for her under Democratic pressure on the more mixed immigration debate.
Noem was also an unserious, performative politician, more concerned with stunts that put her in front of the camera than her job performance. Noem carried that characteristic into the job, dressing up in various DHS costumes, performing the role more than executing it.
One of the sticks that broke Trump’s back was Noem’s $220 million ad campaign for DHS, which prominently featured her. Noem repeatedly claimed that Trump asked her to craft the ad campaign, a claim Trump later denied.
Noem’s lack of competence on the job naturally bled into DHS operations. DHS sources spoke to the Washington Examiner to praise her firing, saying that “People in the office are actually crying out of happiness.”
Noem and her top aide, Corey Lewandowski, were the ones who put Greg Bovino in charge of Border Patrol deportation operations inside the United States. Bovino was removed from the job after he and Noem lost control of the situation in Minneapolis, which led to the far more competent border czar Tom Homan being sent in to clean up the mess.
Noem managed to make things even worse in the aftermath of a Border Patrol shooting of activist Alex Pretti. Noem falsely repeated White House chief of staff Stephen Miller’s claim that Pretti was essentially a domestic terrorist. She then indirectly attacked gun rights activists, claiming that “I don’t know of any peaceful protester that shows up with a gun and ammunition rather than a sign.”
Noem and Lewandowski, dogged by rumors of carrying on an extramarital affair for years, tried to alter the structure of DHS dramatically. That included prioritizing quotas and recklessly pushing ahead with deportations to meet those numbers. This was over the objections of an experienced professional in Homan, who wanted to prioritize targeting illegal immigrants who committed crimes while in the U.S.
DHS under Noem was chaotic, and it quickly burned through the goodwill that voters had toward Trump’s deportation plans and toward federal agents. Under Noem, Trump’s approval on border security and immigration dropped from a 50%-50% split to a 40%-60% split. Approval of Immigration and Customs Enforcement dropped to 34%.
Noem’s incompetence has saddled her successor with problems that will now be his (and Trump’s) to solve. Trump chose Mullin to replace Noem, and he already has support and praise from Democratic Sens. John Fetterman (PA) and Peter Welch (VT). Noem has also saddled Mullin with a partial shutdown initiated by Senate Democrats, who are blocking funding for DHS.
Unlike Noem, Mullen has good working relationships with Democrats. But he is also no pushover, willing to mix it up with Democrats and liberal media, and do so with an actual grasp of the issues in front of him. He has shown that he is capable of vociferously defending ICE agents from Democratic rhetoric without resorting to reckless accusations as Noem did.
All of that means that Mullin has the competence, the connections, and the temperament to carry out Trump’s deportation agenda adequately and do so while defending ICE and Border Patrol agents. He is capable of doing everything Noem wasn’t.
We saw what happened when DHS was handed to someone ill-equipped for the job under the Biden administration, and it was not just an issue when it came to immigration. Under Alejandro Mayorkas, DHS botched not just the border crisis but hurricane response through the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Secret Service failures that led to Trump’s near-assassination. Noem similarly struggled with handling FEMA, to the point that even Republicans were frustrated with the lack of transparency.
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If Trump had put someone serious, like Mullin, in this job from the beginning, there would be no problem here. Instead, Noem’s performative politics put her in Trump’s good graces and resulted in her being put in charge of a department far too important for someone with her abysmal track record.
This has been one of the defining issues of both of Trump’s terms, where obviously unfit “influencer” types are put in charge of important agencies or asked to lead on important issues. Trump nearly made this exact mistake with the detestable former Rep. Matt Gaetz as attorney general, and the jury is still out on figures such as FBI Director Kash Patel. Trump’s embrace of unserious actors, including Noem, has made things more difficult for his administration, forcing more competent people, such as Mullin, to come in and clean up the mess.
