Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem sparred with members of the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday over the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement crackdown, a long-awaited hearing after the agency has come under scrutiny in recent months for its hard-line immigration enforcement effort and the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in January.
The department’s handling of the Minnesota unrest has placed Noem and ICE officers squarely in Democrats’ crosshairs in recent weeks and has prompted Democrats — and two Senate Republicans — to call for Noem to resign.
The hours-long hearing comes as the Senate remains deadlocked on a plan to fully fund DHS through September. Democrats in the chamber previously outlined a list of 10 demands they said immigration officers must meet before they would agree to pass the short-term funding measures.
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Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and others have criticized Noem for asking them to fully fund DHS despite the weeks that passed between the two ICE shootings in Minnesota and Noem’s testimony. She “expects us to rubber stamp her record-breaking budget in the meantime,” Durbin said previously.
Republicans and Noem used the hearing Tuesday to warn of the knockdown effects the partial shutdown has had on the myriad federal departments and agencies housed under DHS’s sprawling umbrella, including the Secret Service, Transportation Security Administration, FEMA and the U.S. Coast Guard, among others.
Here are the biggest moments from Tuesday’s hearing.
Noem focused her ire during Tuesday’s hearing on Senate Democrats, whom she blamed for failing to keep DHS funded through September even after the House passed a bipartisan, full-year funding bill.
“Despite the House passing a bipartisan, bicameral, full-year DHS funding bill, it is Senate Democrats who have chosen not to fund the department and have held this department hostage,” Noem said Tuesday, mentioning critical national security efforts that could be hampered as the result of a protracted shutdown, including, but not limited to, issues of border security, immigration enforcement, aviation security, disaster response, cybersecurity and the protection of critical infrastructure.
She also cited the effect the agency-wide shutdown has on DHS employees in about 22 federal departments and agencies within DHS.
“More than 100,000 dedicated DHS employees are once again being asked to work without pay for the third time in just five months at a time when we produced the most secure border in history and removed nearly 3 million illegal aliens from our country,” she said.
“Disrupting the department responsible for those gains is indefensible.”
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Earlier Tuesday, Durbin pressed Noem to explain what he said was DHS’s lack of compliance with federal court orders that have sought to block or pause some of the Trump administration’s sweeping immigration enforcement efforts and removals.
“Sir, we ensure that we follow the law that applies to our department, and who we detain and who we deport back to their home countries,” Noem told Durbin.
Durbin followed up by referencing a statistic from Trump’s first term that found 85% of the migrants ICE arrested “had no violent criminal record.”
“Sir, when you talk about violent crimes, what you’re saying is the crimes that don’t matter, that you aren’t counting, are the ones that affect American families every single day,” Noem responded. “You’re not counting DUIs. You’re not counting embezzlement. You’re not counting theft. And you’re not counting the other crimes against people and drug trafficking and proliferating that.
” If you were counting crimes that these individual illegal aliens in this country have committed, it would be well over 65% to 70% of the individuals that are detained today have those crimes on their record,” Noem said. “Besides the crime of being in this country illegally.”
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In one notable moment, Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., pressed Noem on whether DHS planned to deploy ICE officers to polling sites on Election Day, echoing a view recently endorsed by former Trump advisor Steve Bannon.
Asked whether she would rule out deploying ICE or CBP agents to polling places during the upcoming November midterm elections, Noem responded that there are “no plans to have ICE officers at our polling locations.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” Coons responded. “But would you rule it out? Would you say it will not happen?”
In response, Noem shot back, “Do you plan on illegal aliens voting in our elections?”
That moment earned wide praise from conservative commentators on social media.
Noem also updated Grassley on the status of HHS’s Unaccompanied Children (UC) program, which, under the Biden administration, placed more than 11,000 migrant children with non-vetted sponsors to house the children who were not a parent or legal guardian, according to information shared by his office. Grassley’s office previously submitted multiple oversight requests to DHS on the program, citing concerns that it placed children with dangerous or unvetted sponsors and restricted sharing information with law enforcement.
Grassley and the Trump-led DHS have alleged that the Biden administration turned a “blind eye” to children who needed proper supervision and care and cited concerns over background check failures, a lack of documentation in some cases and lax vetting procedures that allowed migrant children in the program to be “lost” or otherwise released to dangerous sponsors.
The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General released a report on the program last year, and Noem appeared to reference it during her testimony Tuesday.
Noem told lawmakers Tuesday that 450,000 children who entered the U.S. as “unaccompanied alien children” were “lost by the Biden administration and not tracked.”
“We’ve located about 145,000 of them, and we’ve done that through the investigative work of our Homeland Security Investigations team,” Noem said.
“The one thing that has been challenging is that, under the Biden administration, the government paid sponsors in HHS in order to host these children and those sponsors. Many times, we found instances where they trafficked these children themselves,” Noem continued.
“So, under that administration, we not only had children that were in this country as a part of a program, the government was paying individuals that were knowingly trafficking them and abusing them,” Noem said. “That has stopped. We have gone through and found these children and put them back with their families when we have the opportunity to do so and with loved ones that will care for them.”
