South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem was asked during her hearing Friday whether she was committed to stopping all threats to homeland security—not just the ones that push Donald Trump’s agenda on immigration.
Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin, who previously served as a Middle East analyst for the CIA, asked Noem if she intended to be “clear and honest about facts” related to terrorist threats in the United States.
“So, it’s just important to me that I know particularly since you do have one of the intelligence agencies within the Department of Homeland Security, that you’re gonna call a spade a spade,” Slotkin said. “The most recent acts of domestic terrorism in New Orleans—horrible incident—in Nevada, had nothing to do with migrants. Correct?”
“Correct,” Noem replied.
“They were homegrown American citizens; one of them was actually in a very elite military unit. I mean, it’s horrible. It’s one of the hardest things to catch. The sort of lone wolf, radicalized American citizen,” Slotkin continued. It’s worth noting that the incident in Nevada, in which a man detonated fireworks inside a Tesla Cybertruck outside the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas, was investigated as a possible terrorist attack but ultimately ruled a suicide by local officials.
“But I want to protect ourselves, our most recent examples of domestic terrorism were not what we have spent the majority talking about today: crime from a migrant,” Slotkin said. She noted that she didn’t dispute that some crimes are committed by immigrants—in fact, Slotkin was one of the more than two dozen Democrats who voted in support of the Laken Riley Act, which would, among other things, allow the government to detain undocumented immigrants accused of committing nonviolent crimes.
During the hearing, several Republican lawmakers had already waxed poetic on their xenophobic views about immigrants and fretted over so-called “migrant crime,” of which Trump had touted gruesome cases on the campaign trail in an attempt to fearmonger about Joe Biden’s immigration and border policies. In reality, undocumented immigrants are statistically less likely to commit a violent crime—but “migrant crime” still manages to take up lots of airtime and column inches, as well as generate clicks because it evidently also wins elections.
“I just want to know, and I want to hear from you, as an intelligence officer, that you’re going to speak about real threats and not blow something up, politicize something, make something more exciting because maybe that’s what the president wants to hear,” Slotkin said. “But your mission to protect and defend the Constitution means calling honestly what the threats are to the country. Can you just give me a ‘yes or no,’ please?”
“Yes, Senator,” Noem replied, before proceeding to answer about half the question. “I will be as transparent and factual every day with you and the American people as possible, based on the information that I have.”
“I don’t know if the investigations are closed in New Orleans and in Nevada, but what we know so far and needs to be related to the American people needs to be the truth and facts,” Noem said, as if to leave the door open to potential immigrant connections in those incidents—a wild theory that some Republicans, including Trump’s incoming “border czar” Tom Homan, pushed in the weeks since.
Whether she intended to focus on threats from American citizens with the same politicized fervor with which her Republican colleagues have addressed the crimes of undocumented immigrants remains to be seen.
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