Kristi Noem’s grip on the Department of Homeland Security is slipping, and Washington is already moving on. President Donald Trump is going to push out his DHS Secretary after a week of congressional testimony that, by most accounts, was a political disaster, opening a new and damaging chapter in a tenure that has been defined as much by internal chaos as by the hard-line immigration crackdowns that made her a MAGA favorite.
According to sources familiar with the discussions, cited by NBC News, White House officials have already begun floating replacement names. At the top of the list: Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma, the pugnacious former MMA fighter turned Trump loyalist, along with Montana Sen. Steve Daines and former Utah Congressman Jason Chaffetz, who reportedly made his interest known directly to the president. No final decision has been made, but the signal from the White House is unmistakable.
The Hearing That May Have Finished Her
The immediate catalyst was a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that went badly off-script. Noem, facing pointed questions from both parties about a $220 million taxpayer-funded advertising campaign, told lawmakers under oath that Trump had advance knowledge of the contract and had approved it. That testimony landed like a grenade inside the West Wing.
The ad campaign, which prominently featured Noem herself, was designed to encourage immigrants to self-deport. The contract was subcontracted to a firm called Strategy Group, a company formed just days before the award was made, and run by the husband of a senior DHS official who is a close friend of Noem’s. The optics were already bad. Telling Congress that Trump signed off on it made them considerably worse.
But the $220 million contract was not the only thing that made headlines at the hearing. Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse confronted Noem with a large poster-board photograph of a queen-sized bed, six pillows, and an armchair, situated inside the private cabin of a $70 million Boeing 737 MAX 8 jet that Noem has been leasing for DHS travel. The image, first obtained by NBC News from a passenger brochure, showed the bedroom of an aircraft the DHS has been pitching to the Office of Management and Budget as a necessary purchase for deportation operations. The plane also features a kitchen, a bar, multiple large flat-screen televisions, and showers. It was designed, according to the brochure, with an “exceptional interior” by a “renowned New York designer.”
The Wall Street Journal had previously reported that Noem and her senior adviser Corey Lewandowski, with whom she has been alleged to be having an affair while both remain married to other people, had been regularly traveling aboard the aircraft for cross-country trips. At the hearing, Noem’s husband sat directly behind her at the witness table as Whitehouse walked the committee through the jet’s amenities. Noem claimed the bedroom was being “refurbished” and disputed the photographs. DHS later told reporters that “at least one of the bedrooms is currently being converted for seating to prepare the aircraft to meet the demands of its deportation mission set.” The plane currently seats a maximum of 18 passengers. Deportation flights typically carry between 50 and 100 migrants. One unnamed DHS official told NBC the claim that the jet was a necessary deportation purchase was “far-fetched.”
One GOP senator told NBC News that Trump had been calling around Capitol Hill asking for input on Noem since last year, and that her testimony this week was, as the senator put it, “water boiling over the edge of the pot.” Sen. Lindsey Graham, asked directly whether Noem would be replaced, offered only: “Time will tell.” When pressed on whether Trump still had confidence in her, he said: “Stay tuned.”
A Department in Near-Freefall
The hearing was the headline, but it was hardly the whole story. The larger context is a department that has been operating in a state of structural dysfunction since Noem took over. According to a Federal News Network review, roughly 10 percent of all DHS employees left the department last year. A Wall Street Journal investigation found that approximately 80 percent of career leadership at ICE has been fired or demoted under her watch. The agency that is supposed to enforce the president’s signature immigration agenda has essentially eaten its own institutional knowledge.
Noem’s top adviser, Corey Lewandowski, has been central to the purges. Together, the two have fired, reassigned, and demoted officials across all 23 of DHS’s sub-agencies, creating what multiple reports describe as a pervasive culture of fear. FEMA has cycled through two acting directors. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has bled senior leadership and has gone over a year without a Senate-confirmed director.
Noem clashed repeatedly with White House border czar Tom Homan, who eventually took over ICE operations in Minneapolis directly at Trump’s request, a humiliating workaround that said everything about confidence levels in her leadership.
Minneapolis, Dead Americans, and a Secretary Who Won’t Apologize
Hovering over all of it are two shootings in Minneapolis that turned into a national flashpoint. Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, and Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA hospital, were both fatally shot by federal immigration agents in separate encounters. In both cases, serious questions were raised about the use of force. In both cases, Noem responded with what critics described as reflexive deflection rather than accountability.
Noem refused to apologize to the families of Good and Pretti after it emerged that she had publicly smeared both individuals with terrorism allegations following their deaths. When asked directly at the Senate hearing about those characterizations, she declined to walk them back. That performance drew bipartisan criticism and prompted more than 70 House Democrats to formally introduce articles of impeachment, citing the killings, constitutional violations related to congressional oversight of ICE facilities, and the misuse of taxpayer funds for the ad campaign.
Republican senators including Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Thom Tillis of North Carolina called the Minneapolis shootings “incredibly disturbing” and demanded thorough investigations. Sen. Cassidy specifically warned that the credibility of both ICE and DHS was at stake.
The Prison Photo Op That Said Everything
Long before the hearing debacle, Noem had established a pattern of treating the machinery of federal law enforcement as a personal content studio. In March 2025, she flew to El Salvador to tour CECOT, the country’s infamous Terrorism Confinement Center, a megaprison that holds up to 40,000 people under conditions that human rights organizations have described as involving extreme overcrowding, no due process, and cruel treatment. More than 300 deaths have been reported in Salvadoran state custody, some showing signs of violence.
Noem stood in front of a cell packed with shirtless, tattooed men on metal bunks, pointed at the camera, and delivered a threat to would-be immigrants. “If you come to our country illegally, this is one of the consequences you could face,” she said, wearing an ICE baseball cap and a reported $50,000 Rolex. She posted the video to social media and called CECOT “one of the tools in our toolkit.” Critics, including legal scholars and human rights lawyers, noted that many of the men imprisoned there had never been convicted of anything. Some were deported based on tattoos, including an autism awareness ribbon and a hummingbird. The Trump administration later acknowledged it had deported at least one man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who had protected legal status, to CECOT as an “administrative error.” The Supreme Court ordered his return. He remained imprisoned.
The episode drew comparisons to Abu Ghraib, with critics pointing out that rather than being concealed as a scandal, the prison imagery was being produced and distributed as administration propaganda. Noem’s visit effectively opened the door for a series of Republican congressional photo ops at CECOT that followed in her wake.
The Dog She Shot, and the Résumé She Built on It
It would be incomplete to discuss Noem’s tenure without mentioning how she introduced herself to the national stage. In her own political memoir, published before her nomination as DHS secretary, Noem described taking Cricket, her 14-month-old hunting dog, to a gravel pit and shooting him dead after the dog got loose, attacked a neighbor’s chickens, and nipped at her. “I hated that dog,” she wrote. She used the same trip to shoot a goat she also didn’t like, leaving the animal wounded and suffering while she walked back to her truck to reload her gun before returning to finish the job. She presented both killings not as regrettable incidents, but as evidence of her toughness and willingness to do hard things, a qualities-of-leadership argument aimed at Republican primary voters. The calculation backfired spectacularly. The story went internationally viral and became the defining anecdote of her pre-confirmation political identity.
The dog story was, in retrospect, something of a preview. Noem has consistently demonstrated a comfort with cruelty as brand strategy, a willingness to deploy it publicly, and a genuine surprise when the reaction turns negative. That dynamic has repeated itself, at larger scale, throughout her time at DHS.
Mullin: Loyal, Combative, Untested at Scale
Markwayne Mullin has built his political identity almost entirely around proximity to Trump and a willingness to throw elbows. He most recently made headlines for confronting Rep. Al Green during Trump’s State of the Union address. He is reliably in sync with Trump’s worldview, which has made him a trusted figure in the president’s orbit.
Asked Thursday about the possibility of replacing Noem, Mullin said he had not spoken with the president that week and declined to engage with hypotheticals. He also notably said that Noem is “a friend” and that he would continue supporting her “as long as the president does,” which, in Washington’s political grammar, is the kind of carefully calibrated answer you give when you know the ground is shifting.
What Mullin has not done is run anything close to the scale of DHS, which oversees border security, immigration enforcement, disaster response, cybersecurity, and the U.S. Secret Service, among other functions. That’s roughly 260,000 employees across a department that is already in a state of significant institutional distress. Whether combative loyalty translates into competent management of a sprawling federal bureaucracy is an open question, and not a small one.
What Comes Next
Trump is known to discuss personnel changes extensively before acting on them, and sources cautioned that Noem’s removal is far from certain. A DHS spokesperson issued a statement noting that Noem “serves at the pleasure of the president” and touting a secure border and record-low murder rates under her leadership. The White House did not respond to requests for comment.
Adding another layer of complication: DHS funding expired recently, and Senate Democrats have made clear they will not support any appropriations bill that includes DHS funding without significant reforms, citing the Minneapolis shootings and broader ICE conduct. The politics of replacing Noem are complicated by a department that is simultaneously under siege from Democrats, short-staffed, and entangled in a funding standoff.
If Noem goes, she would become the first Cabinet secretary to exit in Trump’s second term, an ignominious distinction for someone who arrived in Washington with real political momentum after years of cultivating a national profile. What she leaves behind, if it comes to that, is a department where 80 percent of ICE leadership has turned over, two civilian deaths remain under investigation, a $220 million ad contract became a scandal, a $70 million luxury jet with a bedroom is being pitched as a deportation plane, and a prison photo op in El Salvador is being compared to Abu Ghraib.
That’s not a border crisis. That’s a management crisis layered under a character crisis layered under a judgment crisis. And at some point, even a president who prizes loyalty above almost everything else apparently has limits.