KKKristi Noem walked into the Dirksen Senate Office Building today in a dark suit and heels, flanked by supporters holding photos of crime victims, and proceeded to demonstrate — for approximately five uninterrupted hours — exactly why she should not be running the second-largest federal department in the United States of America.
She stonewalled. She deflected. She blamed Democrats for a shutdown that exists because her agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis and the Senate said, reasonably, that maybe we should talk about that before cutting you another check. She called the deaths of Alex Pretti and Renee Good “tragic situations” and then declined — when pressed directly — to apologize to their families for branding them domestic terrorists on national television before the blood was even dry on the street.
That’s where we are. That’s who is running DHS.
Here’s what you need to know:
Alex Pretti was an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis Veterans Affairs hospital. Renee Good was a 37-year-old mother of three. Federal agents shot them both during immigration enforcement operations in Minnesota — Pretti on January 24, Good on January 7. In the immediate aftermath, Noem stood before cameras and declared Pretti had committed “an act of domestic terrorism.” She said this with no evidence. She said this before any investigation was complete. She said this while a video existed that contradicted her version of events — a video that surfaced shortly afterward and made her statement not just wrong but demonstrably, catastrophically wrong.
Today, when Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois asked her directly why she had said it, she said she was relaying information from agents on the ground. When Senator Peter Welch of Vermont asked her if she wanted to apologize to the victims’ parents, she didn’t. She said she “can’t even imagine” what their families went through. But she couldn’t quite find the words to say sorry. She “absolutely strives to provide factual information.” She will “look into it.” The families of two dead Americans are invited to wait. That is not a mistake in leadership. That is a feature of it.
Now. About the Republicans.
This hearing was called by Republicans. Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley, who is approximately nine thousand years old and has seen some things, opened by acknowledging that “mistakes have been made” — which is the Senate version of saying “people are dead and I can’t entirely pretend otherwise.” But it was Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina who set the hearing room on fire and then calmly asked people not to applaud him for it.
Tillis is retiring. And a man with nothing left to lose in Washington, D.C. is a genuinely fascinating creature.
He spent ten minutes — his full allotted time — delivering what he explicitly called a “performance evaluation.” He did not ask Noem questions. He told her what he thought of her. And what he thought was not good.
He called DHS a disaster under her leadership. He said she stonewalled the Office of Inspector General — which cited ten separate instances where the agency misled or blocked investigators — and called it what it was: a failure of leadership and a reason for her to go. He called out the indiscriminate immigration arrests, the detention of American citizens, the Stephen Miller-driven quota culture that prioritized numbers over actual security. “We want a thousand a day, 6,000 a day, 9,000 a day,” he said, and his voice got louder. “Because numbers matter, right? No, they don’t matter. Quality matters. Not quantity.”
Then he brought up the dog.
For those new to the saga of Cricket the Wirehair Pointer: in her 2024 book “No Going Back,” Kristi Noem described taking her 14-month-old hunting dog to a gravel pit and shooting her. She described the dog as “less than worthless” and “dangerous.” She called it a lesson in making hard choices. Tillis, who trains dogs, had opinions about this.
“You are a farmer, and you should know better,” he said. He explained that a 14-month-old dog is essentially a teenager. He explained that you do not take a puppy to a hunting lodge and then kill it when it behaves like a puppy. He connected Cricket, methodically and with real heat, to the deaths in Minneapolis — decisions made in the heat of the moment, without adequate training or investment, that ended in irreversible harm. “Those are bad decisions made in the heat of the moment,” Tillis said, “not unlike what happened up in Minneapolis.”
When Tillis finished, the room applauded. He told them to stop. He said he would hold nominations until Noem responded to his oversight questions, and that if she didn’t respond within two weeks, he would deny quorum in as many committees as he could. This is an extraordinary threat from a member of Noem’s own party.
She did not get to respond. His time was up. That’s almost poetic.
Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, usually a bobblehead for the regime in these hearings, had his own concerns, specifically about a $220 million taxpayer-funded ad campaign featuring Noem on horseback in front of Mount Rushmore. The contract went to a Republican consulting firm with documented ties to Noem’s own staff. Kennedy asked about it with the energy of a man who finds this embarrassing. Noem denied involvement in selecting the firm and said the ads were “extremely effective.” Effective at what, exactly, was not specified — but presumably at making Kristi Noem look like she’s auditioning for a tourism commercial while Rome burns and ICE agents shoot nurses.
Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, called DHS “a reckless and out-of-control agency” and said Noem’s repeated inability to explain or account for specific abuses — her consistent refrain of “I don’t know the situation” and “I’ll look into it” — reflected a total collapse of leadership. He offered a binary: either she is incompetent, or she is knowingly violating the law. He called for her resignation, her removal by the president, or her impeachment by Congress. Noem, who had been keeping it fairly together up to this point, looked at him as his time expired and said, “I appreciate the encouragement.”
That response is going to live in a museum someday.
Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut introduced three people sitting in the hearing room: Javier Ramirez of California, Leonardo Garcia Venegas of Alabama, and Marimar Martinez of Chicago. All three are U.S. citizens. All three were detained by Noem’s agency. He asked them to stand. They stood. He asked Noem if she condemned the officers’ conduct. She said she didn’t “know the situation” but would “look into it.”
Renee Good’s family would like to know how long looking into things takes.
Meanwhile, the shutdown of DHS is now approaching six weeks. Not because Democrats are being reckless — though Noem spent her opening statement insisting exactly that — but because the Senate demanded this hearing as a condition for funding, and it took this long for Noem to show up. TSA agents are working without guaranteed pay. FEMA is strained. The Coast Guard is affected. And Noem spent the morning - predictably - talking about how this is the Democrats’ fault, while senators from both parties asked her to please account for the two Americans her department killed.
She returns tomorrow to the House Judiciary Committee. Pack a snack.
The pattern here is not complicated. Kristi Noem was handed an agency and a mandate and she chose to run it like a performance rather than a department. She chose optics over oversight. She chose to call a dead ICU nurse a terrorist because agents on the ground told her to, and she never looked at the video. She chose to write a book explaining that shooting your dog is actually a leadership lesson, and then watched a Republican senator read it back to her in a Senate chamber on national television.
She has not apologized. She has not admitted error. She has not demonstrated accountability for a single death, a single wrongful detention, or a single stonewalled investigation. She did, however, mention that DHS needs more funding.
You cannot make this up. You can only document it.
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