Screenshot via C-SPAN.
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) took a metaphorical flamethrower to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem Tuesday, eviscerating her leadership as a “disaster,” furiously criticizing the handling of the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and even bringing up an anecdote from book memoir about shooting her dog.
Tillis has been increasingly outspoken during President Donald Trump’s second term, especially after announcing he would not run for re-election to the Senate seat he has held since 2014. DHS has not escaped his scrutiny, as he previously called for Noem’s ouster in late January after Good and Pretti were shot in Minneapolis by an ICE agent and two Border Patrol agents, respectively.
In 2024, chatter about Noem possibly becoming Trump’s vice presidential pick exploded after the release of her memoir included her admission that she had shot and killed a puppy named Cricket after deeming her “untrainable” and “less than worthless” — and then a goat shortly thereafter. Nonetheless, after Trump won the election, he tapped her to head DHS instead. South Park viciously satirized Noem over the incident in an episode last summer showing her as a serial killer of puppies leading a squadron of unqualified and inexperienced ICE agents to tackle and detain anyone who appeared Hispanic.
During Tuesday’s agency oversight hearing held by the Senate Judiciary Committee, Tillis unleashed years of criticism upon Noem, frequently raising his voice in fury and frustration as he explained that he had opposed a lot of the Biden administration’s immigration policies, but what was happening under Noem also represented a failure.
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Tillis said he was “disappointed” in Noem because ICE was wasting “limited resources” by not going after the serious criminals.
“ICE can’t be everywhere at once,” he said, but the agents were still prioritizing “running numbers that [White House senior adviser] Stephen Miller wants out of the White House.”
“We just want numbers!” Tillis shouted as he waved his hands angrily. “A thousand a day! Six thousand a day! Nine thousand a day! Because numbers matter, right? No, they don’t matter! Quality matters! Not quantity, quality! And what we’ve seen is a disaster under your leadership, Ms. Noem! A disaster!”
“What we’ve seen is innocent people getting detained that turn out are American citizens,” he continued, lambasting “the culture that’s being created here, with Stephen Miller aiding and abetting.”
Tillis sharply criticized how Trump administration officials, including Noem and Miller, had initially accused Good and Pretti of being “domestic terrorists.”
The senator said this was “a performance review” for Noem, and “time after time after time, I’ve been disappointed.”
Tillis, who represents a state that has been hit hard by hurricanes in recent years, vented his anger about Noem’s “incompetent” management of FEMA, which he characterized as putting unnecessary bureaucratic delays on funding and assistance. Western North Carolina had suffered $60 billion in damage “from the most significant storm they’ve ever experienced,” he said, compared to the biggest disaster in South Dakota when she was governor that was only about half a billion dollars.
“Thousands of people are hurting in North Carolina and you’re just barely catching up!” he seethed.
When Noem tried to respond, he cut her off, saying he had “done the analysis,” and it was clear she had “failed at FEMA,” and he believed she was violating federal law by “obstructing” the funds to hold them for her personal approval, before returning to the topic of the Minneapolis shootings.
Public opinion turning against the Trump administration’s immigration policies and deportations was also her fault, he said, because of “the way you’re going about deporting them is wrong.”
“Why can’t we just say we made a mistake?” he demanded. “The fact that you can’t admit to a mistake which looks like, under investigation, is gonna prove that Ms. Good and Mr. Pretti probably should not have been shot in the face and in the back. Law enforcement needs to learn from that! You don’t protect them by not looking after the facts!”
He called out those who were threatening ICE officers but said it was Noem’s fault, “because you’ve cast a pall on them by acting like we should investigate things differently,” even though “officer-involved shootings have a formula that we should go through every time” with investigations conducted by law enforcement at every local, state, and federal level.
Bringing up Cricket, Tillis said he read her book last week and that part distressed him, because he personally trained dogs, and a 14-month old dog was “basically a teenager in dog years,” so she “should know better” than to take a young untrained puppy out on a pheasant hunt.
He scolded her for bragging about shooting the dog: “You decided to kill that dog because you had not invested in the appropriate time for training and then you have the audacity to go and into a book and say it’s a leadership lesson about tough choices!”
Tillis mentioned how she had also shot a goat “at that same lunch hour,” said as a farmer she should’ve known goats behave badly if they aren’t castrated, and her shooting those two animals and the Minneapolis shootings were “both bad decisions that happened in the heat of the moment.”
Watch the video above via C-SPAN.
The post GOP Senator Absolutely Excoriates Kristi Noem in Wild Exchange: DHS Is a ‘Disaster Under Your Leadership!’ first appeared on Mediaite.