Today, Donald Trump fired DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. It was the right thing to do, long overdue. But he did it for the wrong reasons. There were plenty of reasons to fire Noem. The writing was already on the wall by late January. We discussed it here, noting that, “There is already buzz that if Greg Bovino’s exile isn’t enough to quell the protests, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem could be the next sacrificial lamb. Anyone who works for this president would do well to remember there is no such thing as loyalty; it’s all just transactional benefit. Ask Jeff Sessions. Or Rex Tillerson, John Bolton, John Kelly, and others too numerous to list. If they think Trump will protect them when it no longer benefits him, they are sorely mistaken.” The best reasons to fire Noem are epitomized, but not limited to, what happened in Minneapolis. Renee Good and Alex Pretti are dead, killed by agents under Noem’s control. Instead of condemning their deaths and opening full, transparent investigations into them, she instead, and almost immediately, attacked the two dead Americans. She accused Good of attacking the agents who shot and killed her. She called Pretti a domestic terrorist. Those are lies. Congressman Jamie Raskin gave her a chance to retract those lies in her oversight hearing earlier this week. She refused to. Noem has repeatedly excused unconstitutional law enforcement conduct. Like the abusive arrests of American citizens we discussed here. There are so many incidents where she went to bat for unlawful behavior by her agents, that she became the poster child for it. We’ll never forget five-year-old Liam Ramos being taken into custody with his Spider Man backpack and blue bunny ears hat. We documented some of the earliest abuses in a piece last October that asked, “Are We The Nazis Now?” There are so many others now. Dead American citizens, illegally detained and deported people. All an affront to American democracy, enabled by a DHS Secretary who was seeking the approval of the president who has now fired her. When Congressman Eric Swalwell asked in her oversight hearing if any agent had ever been subject to discipline, Noem didn’t know the answer. Which means she didn’t insist on appropriate discipline in the agency she led, even after the deaths of American citizens. That includes one the agency buried, the shooting death of Texan Ruben Ray Martinez, until it was disclosed and we discussed it last week. Noem should have been fired long ago.
The agency she runs has engaged in flagrant disregard of orders issued by federal judges. Vermont Congresswoman Becca Balint made that clear in the oversight hearing: “A federal judge appointed by George W. Bush identified 210 times—210 times when your agency violated court orders. And one judge has said about ICE, ‘ICE has likely violated more court orders in January of 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.’ Now, Secretary Noem, you have said repeatedly that your department is, ‘following all court orders,’ but just because you keep saying it does not make it true and Americans aren’t stupid and they can see what is happening.” Further back, there was the incident with California Senator Alex Padilla last June. Padilla tried to ask Noem a question during a press conference she was holding in his state. Agents manhandled him to the ground and zip-tied him, as he audibly identified himself. Noem said afterwards on Fox News that Padilla lunged toward the podium where she was speaking and failed to say who he was. That’s a lie too, as video from multiple angles showed. Instead of apologizing, she used an official DHS social media account to criticize the Senator.
This pose in front of CECOT prisoners. Sickening. Unfit to be a cabinet secretary.
Under Noem’s leadership, ICE denied members of Congress access to the facilities they held detained people in, in an effort to prevent them from engaging in oversight, which Congress is entitled by law to do, some would say obligated, given the allegations of rampant abuses. And just in case you thought FEMA couldn’t sink any lower than it did following Hurricane Katrina, Noem “accomplished” that too, tying up payments that, not to put too fine of a point on it, are American taxpayer funds earmarked for Americans going through catastrophic emergencies. But none of that got Noem fired. Trump fired her today because she was making him look bad. Not because what she did was wrong, was awful. If that had been the case, he would he fired her when she did it. He would have reined her in. He never did. In fact, MS NOW’s Vaughn Hillyard suggested that there had been a strong push from people like Stephen Miller for her to deliver still more deportations.
Colorado Representative Joe Neguse wanted answers from Noem about a highly questionable $220 million vanity ad campaign she entered into with Safe America Media. (I’ve seen the dollar value of the entire campaign set at everything from $100 million to $220, Neguse pegged it at $143, but both the AP and ProPublica set it at $220). You know the ads—Noem on horseback, carefully styled hair streaming behind her in the wind, proudly touting the accomplishments she and Donald Trump had achieved. Neguse: “You want the American people to believe that this is all above board? That $143 million of taxpayer money just happened to go to this one company that doesn’t have a headquarters, doesn’t have a website, has never done work for the federal government before, and is registered, apparently, or attached to a residence from a political operative and, of course, one of the subcontractors of that contract, as you know, is a political firm that’s tied to you back when you were governor of South Dakota? The reason why I asked these questions is that this is taxpayer money.” Noem has claimed the ad contract was awarded through a competitive process, but both the AP and ProPublica have reported long-time Republicans operatives are the beneficiaries. And this morning, NBC’s Julia Ainsley reported that, “Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem handpicked contractors to lead a $100 million campaign to recruit Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers instead of allowing competitive bidding for the jobs, according to three administration officials and internal communications reviewed by NBC News.” DHS denied it, but we’ve seen Noem’s track record with the truth. Louisiana Senator John Kennedy seems to have put the nail in her coffin. During her Senate oversight hearing earlier this week he pushed her on who signed off on the expensive and highly flattering ad campaign. She said the president knew about it. That turned out to be a fatal mistake. Kennedy described Trump as “pissed off.” Many news sources today attribute her firing to the comment. It’s a convenient excuse for firing a contestant whose ratings had started to lag. The star of the show didn’t want any of her tarnish to rub off on him. Noem was fired in a Truth Social post that Trump sent while she was speaking publicly. She appeared to be taken by surprise. This administration is reality TV, not responsible governance. Trump apparently thinks he can appease his viewers with pictures of his new ballroom. He posted a series of them on Truth Social today. Like this one.
There were plenty of reasons Noem should have never been appointed in the first place. That responsibility lands on the senators that confirmed her as well as the president who nominated her, so spare me the late-in-the-game outrage of a John Kennedy or a Thom Tillis. They’re willing to criticize when they don’t face any political consequences for it and the die is already cast. They could have kept this from happening by refusing to confirm her. And there’s no reason to believe they’ll act any more responsibly on the do-over opportunity they will get to confirm the next DHS Secretary. We will watch. The new DHS chief nominee, straight from central casting for the Trump administration, is Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin. The only member of Congress without a bachelor’s degree, Mullin holds an associate degree in construction technology from Oklahoma State University Institute of Technology. Oklahoma is nowhere near the border. It’s hard to figure out what his expertise for running Homeland Security is. Trump has given Noem a new job as a buh-bye present. Something about the Shield of America. I’ll leave it to others to make the Marvel Universe jokes. But you have to ask why he’d fire her as the Secretary, under a cloud of allegations, just to give her another taxpayer funded job. (You might also ask what former cabinet secretary would be desperate enough to accept this sort of post, where she will work several levels below her former colleagues in the Cabinet, Secretaries Rubio and Hegseth). It looks like a bit of “Keep your enemies closer.” Noem has been an insider. There is undoubtedly a lot that she knows. But she also probably needs the job and the safe landing. She’s not someone who has a lot of places to go once she loses her “in” with Trump. The new job, despite the tremendous loss of status, secures her ongoing loyalty, at least for now. And so we see how this administration continues to operate. It’s the same way that Trump always has. It’s a despicable mixture of kleptocracy (government corruption) and kakistocracy (government incompetence), unleashed on Americans by the man who claimed, “I alone can fix it.” But we all know he can’t. Thanks for being here with me at Civil Discourse. I appreciate your support, which makes the newsletter possible. We’re in this together, Joyce You're currently a free subscriber to Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance . For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
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Thursday, March 5, 2026
Fired, But For the Wrong Reason
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