President Donald Trump said Thursday he is replacing Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem, a move that came amid mounting bipartisan criticism of her stewardship of the administration’s mass deportation agenda and efforts to dismantle the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Trump announced the decision on social media and said Noem would be replaced by Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Oklahoma), effective at the end of this month. Noem, he said, will move into a new role as “Special Envoy for The Shield of the Americas,” which he described as part of a new Western Hemisphere security initiative that will be unveiled at an event in Florida on Saturday.
In his post, Trump praised Noem as having “served us well” and praised her for “numerous and spectacular results (especially on the Border!).”
Noem has faced increasing uncertainty over whether she would remain in her position as the public soured on her agency’s aggressive immigration enforcement and as even some Republicans questioned whether she was fit for the job. Her ouster adds more potential instability to the Department of Homeland Security at a time when the agency remains partially shut down because of an impasse over a funding extension on Capitol Hill, where Democrats are demanding new accountability measures for federal immigration officers.
Noem was attending a conference in Nashville when Trump made the announcement, delivering the keynote address at the Sergeant Benevolent Association Major Cities Conference.
She did not acknowledge her ouster while answering unrelated questions from the audience and reciting what she viewed as the agency’s accomplishments in carrying out Trump’s agenda, including an alleged 750,000 deportations. She mentioned that she would join Trump and two other Cabinet secretaries Saturday to announce an agreement to combat drug cartels.
Later, in a social media post, Noem acknowledged her removal from DHS, thanking the president and touting “historic accomplishments at the Department of Homeland Security.”
Mullin, 48, was elected to the Senate in 2022 after spending a decade in the House. He is considered one of the Republican senators closest to Trump. Mullin left a closed-door Senate Republican lunch at 1:26 p.m. and walked out of the Capitol. Trump announced his nomination 15 minutes later on social media, while the lunch was still going on.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) said he thought Mullin would bring “a fresh set of eyes and a fresh approach” to DHS. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) — another Trump ally — praised the announcement, saying “it was time for a change.”
Democrats were more circumspect. Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), who caucuses with Democrats, described Mullin as “an upgrade, absolutely” from Noem but said that “pretty much anybody is.” Sen. Cory Booker (D-New Jersey) said that Noem should still be “held to account for the corruption that she has shown with the contracting” and “for violating the constitutional rights of Americans.”
Over the first 13 months of his second term, Trump did not fire any of his Cabinet secretaries, a contrast to the relatively rapid turnover of his first term. Over the same period in 2017-2018, Trump replaced several Cabinet secretaries and his chief of staff.
The move to replace Noem appeared to come as a surprise to her, as she had told aides that Trump asked her in December to stay through the midterms, according to people familiar with the matter.
But Trump told advisers that he had grown increasingly unhappy with Noem after DHS’s surge of thousands of immigration enforcement officers in Minnesota in December and January, an escalation that resulted in officers fatally shooting two U.S. citizens, said two people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the president’s conversations.
Noem’s testimony at a Senate committee oversight hearing this week also rankled Trump, who was displeased with her defense of a $200 million ad campaign that featured Noem, and her assertion that Trump had signed off on the campaign, the people said. The Wall Street Journal first reported Trump’s frustrations with Noem.
During the hearing, Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-Louisiana) pressed Noem about the ad campaign, which had been launched not long after she took over at DHS in February 2025.
When Kennedy asked if Trump had approved the multimillion-dollar campaign, Noem replied, “Yes, sir, we went through the legal processes,” and she said Trump knew about it ahead of time.
“It puts the president in a terribly awkward spot,” Kennedy told Noem, expressing skepticism that the president would agree to the ad campaign.
Kennedy said Thursday that he had spoken with the president Tuesday night and described Trump’s recollection about the ads as “distinctly different” than what Noem had recounted.
“The president was not happy, and I remember thinking that the secretary is pretty much dead as fried chicken,” Kennedy told reporters after Trump’s announcement.
During the hearing, lawmakers also repeatedly pressed Noem about her quick pronouncements after the fatal shootings in Minneapolis in January of Renée Good, a mother of three, and Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse, suggesting they had been threatening immigration officers in acts that amounted to “domestic terrorism.” Democrats, along with a handful of Republicans, lambasted her for quickly jumping to that conclusion before an investigation had been complete.
Noem also said Pretti had brandished a gun, though she provided no evidence, and video footage of the shooting contradicted her account. During back-to-back congressional hearings, Noem repeatedly refused to apologize for her statements.
Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) said Thursday that he was pleased that Trump had removed Noem but vowed that Democrats will continue to seek changes to DHS and the administration’s immigration enforcement operations.
Democrats have demanded that the White House and Republicans agree to a long list of new restrictions on federal immigration officers. The two sides have been negotiating for weeks on a DHS funding deal but were unable to forge an agreement before the agency closed some operations last month.
“It goes beyond any one person,” Schumer said Thursday. “We need to straighten out the whole agency. The rot there is deep.”
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee will hold the hearing on Mullin’s nomination. A married father of six, Mullin describes himself as a “working cow-calf rancher” and businessman. A former mixed martial arts fighter, he is known by colleagues to be pugilistic, and he recently described committee chair Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) as a “freaking snake.”
Noem, a former South Dakota governor, became a symbol of the administration’s brash and bombastic style on immigration soon after she was appointed last January. She gloated frequently about DHS’s arrests of undocumented immigrants in highly produced videos the agency posted on social media.
Border crossings dropped to the lowest level in decades, and arrests of undocumented immigrants already in the country rose significantly but fell short of meeting White House goals. Her department’s spending and her own use of government resources have also drawn scrutiny from lawmakers. The Washington Post reported last year that she was living rent-free in the Coast Guard commandant’s home.
Noem has been dogged by questions about the role of her top adviser Corey Lewandowski, a former Trump campaign manager who was listed as a “special government employee” and was frequently seen with Noem at official events. Lewandowski played an influential role in key decisions at DHS, including reviewing contracts that exceeded $100,000.
Trump’s top advisers in the White House have feuded with Lewandowski dating back to the campaign.
White House officials repeatedly intervened to reverse DHS actions, including cutting counterterrorism funding to New York, suspending TSA PreCheck screening during a department shutdown and releasing a report on the future of FEMA.
Noem has repeatedly said that her department was “rooting out fraud, waste and abuse” within FEMA and that she does not believe it should “exist as it does today.” As a result, she has undercut FEMA’s autonomy, many current and former agency officials have said. In June, she instituted a new approval process for every expense over $100,000, which, for FEMA during a disaster, is nearly everything. That drastically slowed the agency’s operations and resulted in critical contracts, such as those for call centers during the Texas floods, lapsing.
One lawmaker, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina), grew so frustrated with Noem that he berated her during the Senate oversight hearing this week for an anecdote in her 2024 autobiography in which she wrote that she shot her 14-month-old dog, Cricket, because she was poorly behaved.
On Thursday, Tillis praised Trump’s selection of Mullin, describing his Senate colleague in a social media post as a “great guy and a great choice.” He added that there was one other big positive about Mullin.
“He likes dogs.”
Dan Diamond, Paul Kane and Maria Sacchetti contributed to this report.
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