President Donald Trump on Tuesday said he would not ask Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to resign after he was forced to reverse course on the aggressive, made-for-social-media immigration crackdown she engineered in Minnesota following the deaths of two Americans at the hands of federal agents.
The president defended the former South Dakota governor while speaking to reporters before departing the White House for a planned speech on the economy in Iowa. Asked whether he would press her to step down in the wake of two fatal shootings in less than a month — including Saturday’s killing of Minneapolis nurse Alex Pretti by a Border Patrol agent — Trump simply replied: “No.”
When pressed further on whether he still has confidence in Noem’s ability to lead the sprawling Homeland Security bureaucracy that includes agencies like the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Secret Service in addition to the myriad agencies that handle immigration matters, Trump said he thinks she’s “doing a very good job” because the U.S.-Mexico border is “totally secure.”
His defense of the embattled homeland security secretary comes just one day after she and her de facto chief of staff and political adviser Corey Lewandowski met with Trump in the Oval Office for a multi-hour sit-down at her request.
Noem had demanded the meeting after Trump publicly undercut her supervision of the administration’s crackdown on the Democratic-leaning city of Minneapolis by dispatching White House Border Czar Tom Homan, a veteran immigration and law enforcement official who ran ICE during the first 18 months of Trump’s first term, to Minnesota.
The operation, which ICE and CBP officials had dubbed “Operation Metro Surge,” had been heretofore run by Greg Bovino, a pugnacious Border Patrol official from California who Noem had elevated with a fake title of “Commander-at-Large” while giving him and his agents free rein to conduct aggressive roving patrols and violently push back on any protests that resulted.
But both Noem and Bovino drew the president’s ire after they were caught blatantly lying about Pretti’s intentions after Border Patrol agents fired at least nine shots into his back after relieving him of a pistol he was carrying legally under Minnesota law.
At a press conference after the shooting at FEMA headquarters, Noem claimed the shooting had been the consequence of “a situation where an individual arrived at the scene to inflict maximum damage on individuals and kill law enforcement” even though Pretti never drew his weapon and did not confront the agents before he was tackled after trying to help a woman who’d been shoved by a CBP agent.
She also falsely accused him of having “reacted violently” when agents attempted to disarm him — a claim that was easily contradicted by video of the shooting.
Bovino also falsely accused Pretti of having violent intent when he told reporters it “look[ed] like” Pretti “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.”
The Border Patrol agent has been relieved of his duties in Minneapolis and is reportedly being returned to his position in California, but Noem and Lewandowski remain on the job at DHS.
Yet the pressure on the homeland security secretary may continue to rise as Democrats in the House and Senate make plans to present articles of impeachment against her.
Several Democratic senators have called for her to resign or be fired, including Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman, one of a number of Democrats who voted to confirm her last year.
Fetterman, who has in recent months staked out a moderate lane in his caucus and been an occasional defender of the president and his administration, said in a statement that he was making a “direct appeal” for Trump to sack Noem “immediately” because “Americans have died” and she is “betraying DHS’s core mission and trashing your border security legacy..”
He added that Trump should not make the same mistake he attributed to former president Joe Biden’s decision not to fire his own homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, for being “grossly incompetent.”
