Even Senate Republicans Aren't Buying Kristi Noem's ICE Lies And B*llshit

Do not have to hand it to her for sticking to her script.

Mar 04, 2026

On Tuesday, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem spent four-and-a-half-hours testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee — and I’ll give her this, she did not break once. At no point during the hearing did she admit to doing a single thing wrong or to having any knowledge of any ICE officers doing anything wrong or anything bad happening to anyone while being held in detention. She had a script and, by God, she stuck to it. She stuck to it when it made no sense whatsoever, when told stories that practically any other normal person on earth with a basic sense of right and wrong would have to characterize as, at the very least, “a bad thing.”

But Kristi Noem is not a normal person with a basic sense of right and wrong. Kristi Noem is a woman who shot a 14-month old puppy and then bragged about it in her memoir. And while we cannot confirm that Kristi Noem fulfills the other two prongs of the MacDonald Triad, her responses to the questioning were certainly giving sociopathy.

Throughout the hearing, Noem was repeatedly asked about having described Renee Good and Alex Pretti, American citizens murdered by ICE officers, as domestic terrorists. She was asked over and over again to admit that this was a bad thing to do and she refused, and instead pivoted to offering condolences to their families. She was asked over and over again if she thought the ICE officers who killed these people were in the wrong and she couldn’t admit that, either.

She was also asked, repeatedly, about Marimar Martinez, a US citizen born in Chicago, who was present for the hearing and survived being shot five times by a Border Patrol agent while taking clothes to her church for donation. Noem was unable to agree that US citizens should not be shot five times by Border Patrol agents while on their way to church. Of course, she also insisted that she had absolutely no knowledge of this incident, despite the fact that it was national news and kind of a big deal.

She was asked about how that Border Patrol agent later bragged to his colleagues in a group text, “I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys,” later writing, “I’m up for another round of ‘fuck around and find out.'” And each time Noem said she didn’t know enough about the situation to know if that was a bad thing to say after shooting an American citizen on her way to church or not.

Finally, after Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) repeatedly asked her if she thought it was wrong, Noem managed a weak “Well, sir, the way that you have portrayed it, it appears to be, but let me look into the case so I can speak to the specifics of it.”

Blumenthal then pointed out that the agent, Charles Exum, had stated that he had Noem’s support, along with Dan Bovino and “El Jefe himself,” by which he meant Donald Trump. Very strange that she would be so supportive of someone without having any knowledge whatsoever of what they did.

Instead of responding to this, however, Noem decided that she was going to turn it around and demand that Blumenthal discuss, instead, a person who was killed by an undocumented immigrant in his state and started going off about “angel families,” as if it is only a problem when someone gets murdered or otherwise assaulted if it is by an undocumented immigrant. Perhaps she should ask some of those “angel families” if they would have preferred their family member be killed by a US citizen. Or an ICE agent, even! Because I will bet you that they would be equally unhappy under those circumstances as well.

The difference here, of course, is that undocumented immigrants who do commit crimes (at lower rates than American citizens, mind you) are not doing so under the direction of Richard Blumenthal. Richard Blumenthal is not the Secretary of Allegedly Homicidal Undocumented Immigrants, whereas Kristi Noem is, indeed, the Secretary of Homeland Security.

When Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) asked Noem if she thought it was perhaps bad when ICE agents broke down the door of elderly American citizen (with no criminal record) ChongLy Scott Thao, refused to look at his ID, and dragged him out in his underwear and Crocs during a Minnesota winter — because they thought that he was a guy who was already in prison — she couldn’t manage that either.

“Do you agree that it is unacceptable for your agents to ram into someone’s door and drag someone out in their underwear and below zero temperatures when they have the wrong guy?” Klobuchar asked.

This would not be a difficult question for most people to answer. But, again, most people are not Kristi Noem. She answered, “Our officers conduct targeted operations and, uh, utilize the law processes that are given to them.”

“Answer that you think that's wrong,” Klobuchar said again.

She could not.

Klobuchar then asked Noem whether she thought it was perhaps bad that an “off-duty officer, someone of color, a US citizen, was stopped and confronted by ICE agents with their guns drawn, demanding her proof of citizenship.”

Noem responded to this by, surprise, talking about “angel families” and how ICE agents are protecting the American people from all of these terrible criminals (the vast majority of whom are not criminals).

My girl Mazie Hirono took a different tack. Rather than asking if specific actions were wrong, the senator from Hawaii repeated the very blatant lies that Noem and other officials told about these incidents and simply asked whether or not they were lies. Noem, of course, was unable to answer. Hirono also asked her about the time she and other officials lied and said they had parental consent to deport over 600 children to Guatemala, and instead of answering that, Noem again started in on the “angel families.”

Hirono then presented Noem with pictures of ICE officers holding a man down and covering his entire face in pepper spray, ICE officers shooting the Reverend of the First Presbyterian Church in Chicago in the face with pepper balls as he was praying, and an ICE officer holding a woman down on the ground after having knocked her around in front of her children and merely asked her, yes or no, if these things were what she saw happening in the photos. Finally, she was forced to give a yes.

Hirono then, without needing much more input from Noem, suggested that ICE agents are behaving this way because they know that no matter what they do to anyone, they will be supported by Noem and the administration. That the fact that both Stephen Miller and JD Vance have repeatedly claimed that they have “absolute immunity” to do anything they want may, indeed, result in them doing anything they want without regard for human life or safety.

As for this next line of questioning, by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island), Noem does not believe her (one of many) DHS luxury jet has a bedroom, which some unkind people have described as a “love nest,” no she does not believe it does.

None of these pictures — the bed, the wet bar — is “accurate.” Kristi Noem said it, so we doubt it’s true.

The Republicans

The vast, vast majority of Republicans on the Committee used their time to complain about the immigration system under Joe Biden or comment on how very sad it is that people are being so mean to the ICE agents, rather than comment on much of anything specific that has gone on during Noem’s tenure as DHS Secretary.

There were, however, a couple surprises. A pretty big one, for me, was that Sen. John Kennedy (R-Louisiana) was actually quite critical of Noem — though only to the extent that he was put out that she supposedly “blamed” Stephen Miller for her calling Alex Pretti a domestic terrorist and that she was blaming him and Trump for all of the very obviously bad things she is doing.

In an admittedly amusing exchange, Noem claimed that Kennedy got that information from a newspaper article featuring only anonymous sources (in Trumpworld, anonymous sources are always made up by journalists), while Kennedy explained that he was referring to a direct, on the record, quote from her, to which she responded that it was only anonymous sources, leading him to explain, again, that it was a direct quote from her, to which she … you get the picture.

The Louisiana Republican also took issue with the $220 million the DHS spent on advertisements featuring Noem (which is a lot, given that the average Super Bowl ad campaign costs between $16 and $29 million), as well as with the fact that one of the agencies that produced the advertisements had only been established 11 days prior and was, by sheer coincidence, run by the husband of Noem’s senior communications advisor, Tricia McLaughlin. Noem insisted here, as when questioned about it by other senators, that she just had no say whatsoever in who got the contracts or how much was spent on them.

(Those with particularly long memories — last year — will note that Noem’s insistence on personally okaying every contract over $100,000 stopped FEMA divers from getting to the Texas Hill Country Girls Camp Floods for days. But who wants to argue about facts?)

Kennedy’s issue with this was not so much that it happened as he didn’t believe that Trump would support spending that much on an ad buy.

But the real standout in this category was Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who is retiring this year and thus out of fucks to give. (And who also apparently has a long enough memory to remember “last year” — a true rarity among Republicans of any stripe.) Now, Tillis doesn’t deserve flowers and candy for now saying things that he we know he wouldn’t if he were up for reelection, and his primary reasoning for criticizing her was not great — basically that things are going so very badly that people are turning on ICE and the idea of mass deportations in general.

Tillis, who trains dogs, drew a line between Noem bragging about shooting a 14-month-old puppy and a goat for misbehaving and her actions in Minnesota. Which … not wrong.

“You decided to kill that dog because you had not invested the appropriate time and training, and then you have the audacity to go into a book and say it’s a leadership lesson about tough choices,” Tillis said.

“My point is, those are bad decisions made in the heat of the moment, not unlike what happened up in Minneapolis,” he added.

Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!

Well, they didn’t actually fight, because he directly told Noem that he was giving her a performance review and did not care to hear from her at all, but it’s always nice to see trouble in paradise.

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Tillis also criticized the way Noem delayed sending FEMA funds while his state of North Carolina has been desperately trying to recover from Hurricane Helene, pointing out that she may very well be violating federal law by doing so.

“The Homeland Security Act of 2002 expressly prohibits the Secretary of Homeland Security from restricting or diverting FEMA resources from the agency’s mission. Based on your disaster response — the chart that I just showed you — I have reason to believe that you’re violating the law, either knowingly or unknowingly,” Tillis said.

In Noem’s defense, I’m going to assume it’s unknowingly, on account of how she is quite stupid.

Tillis even went so far as to call for Noem’s resignation and threaten to block Trump’s nominees if Noem did not get back to him and answer his questions. Although, given who’s up for surgeon general, I kind of hope she does not.

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