URGENT: Kristi Noem is out as Secretary of Homeland Security

Donald Trump just dumped Noem - a tacit admission that her inflammatory and sometimes dishonest public statements on immigration helped turn his strength on the issue into a weakness.

Looks like Kristi Noem will have more time to spend with Corey Lewandowski.

President Trump just announced Noem is out as head of the Department of Homeland Security. Oklahoma senator Markwayne Mullin will replace her.

The move comes two months after Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers killed two American protestors during a disastrous deployment to Minneapolis. Without evidence, Noem insisted both protestors, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were domestic terrorists.

It also comes one day after Noem failed to deny she was having an affair with Lewandowski, her top aide, when she was asked under oath before Congress. (The alleged relationship between Noem and Lewandowski has been an open secret for years. It stopped being a personal matter when he became her chief of staff.)

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It is difficult to overstate the damage Noem and Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, have done to the cause of reasonable immigration restrictions with their preening, false, and inflammatory comments over the last few months.

As I wrote in late January after Pretti’s killing (which followed Good’s):

Instead, for the second time this month news outlets and X posts are filled with a frame-by-frame analysis of the killing of an American citizen by ICE officers: Did his gun go off accidentally? What happened and who is to blame here?

To say the least, this turn of events is not a win for the Trump Administration.

Even worse, the administration’s reaction to the killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, who were both American citizens, has been profoundly tone-deaf. At best. Yes, many of the protestors are breaking the law by interfering with Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations. In some cases, they are putting themselves and the ICE officers at risk.

But calling them “domestic terrorists” or “insurrectionists” is absurd. Even if they are organized in rudimentary ways, the administration has provided no evidence they are working together to hurt or kill any government officials or frontline ICE officers. The violence has gone the other way — and has escalated this month.

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Trump, who obviously recognizes the political stakes here, reined in his operations in Minneapolis within weeks after Pretti’s death. But neither Miller nor Noem seemed to get the memo. (Noem’s decision to dump $220 million on an ad campaign featuring herself didn’t help her standing with Trump either.)

Trump clearly does not want to fire Miller, who essentially runs domestic policy for him. But maybe his decision to dump Noem so publicly will catch Miller’s attention.

Americans strongly support secure borders and agree that admission to the United States is a privilege, not a right.

That doesn’t mean they want platoons of masked, armed men setting up stakeouts outside schools to catch people whose only crime is being in the United States.

There’s a strict but reasonable path here. Trump needs to be sure his advisors don’t keep him from taking it - and getting rid of Noem is a step in the right direction.

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(The Jan. 28 piece.)