2 GOP Senators Call For Trump DHS Secretary To Be Fired

WASHINGTON — Two Republican senators called for the ouster of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Tuesday, saying she failed at her job following a pair of deadly shootings by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis.

“She’s proven that she doesn’t know how to lead, how to de-escalate,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said Tuesday. “She’s exposing ICE officers to dangerous situations. She’s exposing U.S. citizens to deadly, deadly situations.”

“I feel like she is discrediting the law enforcement officers of Homeland Security, whether it’s Border Patrol, ICE, Customs ― she is way out of her depth,” he told HuffPost. “She needs to get out of the DHS.”

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who, like Tillis, voted to confirm Noem to the job last year, said she would not support her again.

“I think it probably is time for her to step down,” Murkowski told reporters. “You have a secretary right now who needs to be accountable to the chaos and some of the tragedy that we have seen.”

Shortly after Alex Pretti’s shooting by a federal immigration agent, Noem and her department claimed the 37-year-old nurse had “violently resisted” officers and that the incident “look[ed] like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” Videos of Pretti’s death later showed those claims to be completely false.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller went even further, falsely calling Pretti an “assassin” who “tried to murder federal agents.”

Noem was also quick to attack Renee Good before an investigation of her death had occurred at the hands of another federal agent in Minneapolis earlier this month. After Good was shot, Noem immediately went on TV to call her a “domestic terrorist.”

“Instead of actually stepping back and being calm, she tells the president, as did Stephen Miller, shortly after the shooting, before anybody could have gotten any on-scene information, that he was a terrorist,” Tillis added of Noem. “What sort of judgment is that for somebody who’s running a very consequential, important organization?”

Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) said it was “not helpful at all” for top Trump administration officials to be using such incendiary rhetoric before the facts were determined.

“Oh gosh, no, not at all,” Fischer told HuffPost. “And anytime people jump to conclusions, and when they don’t know all the facts, you’re going to see things like that take place.”

Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) declined to defend Noem on Tuesday, saying only that her future is “the president’s judgment call.” The GOP leader said that Noem, his fellow South Dakotan and the state’s former governor, “serves at the pleasure of the president.”

“The important thing is that the president’s got confidence in his team,” Thune said.

Noem doesn’t appear to be going anywhere, at least for the moment.

“I think she is doing a very good job,” President Donald Trump told reporters at the White House on Tuesday. “The border is totally secure.”

Nevertheless, Trump hasn’t been satisfied with the way things are going within Noem’s department. He reshuffled the leadership at her agency, sending controversial U.S. Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino packing out of Minnesota, and dispatching his “border czar” Tom Homan there instead amid widespread outcry over the killings of Pretti and Good in Minneapolis.

The changes were applauded by congressional Republicans, who called for an independent investigation into the shootings while standing in support of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement policies.

But Democrats have demanded that Congress go further by passing legislation to restrain ICE and pull its massive force out of Minnesota, threatening to tank an appropriations package that includes funding for the Department of Homeland Security and cause a partial government shutdown over the matter on Friday.

“The fix should come from Congress. The public can’t trust the administration to do the right thing on its own,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in a speech on the Senate floor.

And despite Trump’s softened tone on the situation in Minneapolis over the past 24 hours, as well as his overtures to Minnesota’s Democratic officials, little has changed on the ground as thousands of ICE agents continue to conduct massive sweeps.

“Regardless of the conciliatory things that the president said yesterday, nothing has changed on the ground,” Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) told HuffPost. “We still have roving bands of ICE agents doing raids, and there’s no new information.”

“It’s important to understand that what they have been doing in Minnesota and around the country is completely opaque,” Smith added. “Don’t know the officers’ names [who shot people in Minneapolis], don’t know how many people they’ve detained, don’t know how many people they’ve arrested, don’t know how many people they’ve sent to Texas. That one of the reasons why I think people are so angry and scared, because they don’t know what’s going on.”