Trump Announces He Is Replacing Noem With Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma
The president tapped Markwayne Mullin as the new homeland
security secretary after Kristi Noem was grilled by Republicans at a
congressional hearing.
Mr. Trump announced the change on social media, along with a
new, and previously nonexistent, role for Ms. Noem: special envoy for the
Shield of the Americas, which he said would be a new security initiative for
the Western Hemisphere.
Mr. Trump is close with Mr. Mullin, a Republican, and speaks
with him regularly.
Ms. Noem — the first cabinet member to be ousted in Mr.
Trump’s second term — had been among the key figures in the administration
fulfilling his mass deportation effort, which he campaigned on aggressively and
which was heavily influenced by Stephen Miller, a top White House adviser.
But her tenure had been marked by a string of controversies,
and her fate had been the focus of speculation among Mr. Trump’s allies for
several weeks. On Thursday, the president contradicted remarks that Ms. Noem
made under penalty of perjury in her hearing before a Senate panel on
Wednesday: that Mr. Trump had signed off on a border security advertising
campaign featuring Ms. Noem.
“I never knew anything about it,” Mr. Trump told Reuters.
A White House spokeswoman declined to comment, and referred a reporter to Mr.
Trump’s comments to Reuters.
Ms. Noem has faced scrutiny from lawmakers about the
campaign, on which the government spent $220 million. The firm handling it was
connected to the husband of Ms. Noem’s former spokeswoman.
The ads prominently featured Ms. Noem, including in a scene
filmed on horseback at Mount Rushmore in the former South Dakota
governor’s home state.
Pressed at a separate hearing on Tuesday about the process
for awarding the contracts behind the ad campaign, Ms. Noem said that it all
went through “a competitive process,” and that no political
appointees were involved. On Wednesday, she said the contract was
“all done
correctly, all done legally.”
Senator John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican who forcefully questioned Ms. Noem over ad contracts, told reporters on Thursday that he received a call from the president about her testimony. “Put it this way,” he said. “His recollection and her recollection are different.”
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/03/05/us/trump-news
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