Trump fires Kristi Noem as Homeland Security Secretary whereas she’s mid-speech at reside occasion
Donald Trump has fired Kristi Noem as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, ending her year-long tenure at an agency that is leading his mass deportation efforts and an anti-immigration campaign that has targeted thousands of immigrants and their families.
Trump has nominated Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin to replace her. Her departure is effective March 31.
The president made his announcement on Truth Social while Noem was in the middle of speaking at a conference in Nashville. Noem has “served us well,” the president wrote.
She will be named “Special Envoy for The Shield of the Americas,” according to the president, who described the role as “our new Security Initiative in the Western Hemisphere.”
That initiative will be formally announced Saturday, he said. “I thank Kristi for her service at ‘Homeland,’” he wrote.
“We’re excited about the opportunity,” Mullin told The Independent.
“It’s an honor to be nominated,” he said. “We’re excited about it, we’re excited to get to work, but we still got the nomination process.”
Noem was narrowly confirmed in the Senate by a vote of 59- 34 last January.
Under Noem, DHS secured a mammoth budget to expand detention centers and rapidly hire federal immigration enforcement officers who are accused of surging into American cities with brutal force and jailing tens of thousands of people into detention camps across the country.
Initial reports of her imminent departure followed two days of combative hearings in Congress, where the secretary faced bipartisan frustration over the fatal shootings of two protesters in Minnesota and her handling of multi-million dollar contracts for an advertising campaign in which she was prominently featured.
Those contracts appeared to be the final straw for the president. Trump said he did not sign off on the $200 million ad campaign one day after Noem testified that the president supported it. “I never knew anything about it,” he told Reuters.
Noem — who is a defendant in countless lawsuits against the administration’s attempts to rapidly arrest, detain and deport tens of thousands of people — is the first Cabinet member to be forced out of the administration since Trump returned to the White House last year.
The president’s announcement also arrived in the middle of the ongoing funding lapse at DHS after Democrats blocked a spending bill that they say does not go far enough to restrain immigration officers after Congress gave ICE billions of dollars to build detention centers and hire a small army of new recruits last year.
Democratic members of Congress have call on Noem to resign or face impeachment.
Trump, who met with Noem at the White House in January amid growing calls for her resignation after federal agents killed two people in Minneapolis, had not previously suggested her job was at risk. The president insisted Noem was “doing a very good job,” he told reporters at the time.
“Trump had no choice but to fire her,” Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee wrote Thursday, one day after Noem appeared before the committee.
“Her tenure was marked by systematic constitutional violations, cruelty, corruption, and deadly mismanagement,” they wrote. “That’s her legacy. The next Homeland Secretary has a lot of work to do to transform this lawless masked agency and regain the public’s trust.”
This is a developing story
Source: independent.co.uk
