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Senate confirms Kristi Noem as Homeland Security Secretary, key anti-immigration role



cnn

The Senate voted early Saturday to confirm Kristi Noem as Secretary of Homeland Security, installing a longtime ally of Donald Trump at the helm of an agency that will play a central role in the president’s promised immigration crackdown. .

The vote was bipartisan, 59 to 34.

Noem has served as governor of South Dakota since 2019 and is a former state legislator and four-term congresswoman. He will now be tasked with leading the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), a sprawling agency that oversees everything from U.S. Customs and Border Protection to Immigration and Customs Enforcement to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. and the US Secret Service.

“The mission and success of DHS is more crucial than ever,” Noem told senators during her confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill. “We must secure our borders against illegal trafficking and immigration. We must safeguard our infrastructure to ensure we are protected against cyber attacks, respond to natural disasters and also terrorism.”

Calling border security a “top priority,” Noem said Trump was elected with a “clear mandate” on immigration. “Getting criminal aliens off our streets and out of the country will help make American communities safer again,” he said.

Trump began his second term by taking a series of sweeping immigration executive orders that included declaring a national emergency at the southern border of the United States and beginning the process to end birthright citizenship, a move that sparked an almost immediate legal question.

In addition to the issue of immigration, Noem addressed a variety of other topics during her confirmation hearing. In response to questions from Democrats, he said that under his leadership “there will be no political bias” when it comes to disaster relief and that there must be a focus on domestic terrorism, saying that “homegrown terrorism is on increase,” while calling the deadly New Year’s truck attack in New Orleans “a horrible event.”

Noem’s national profile grew during the Covid-19 pandemic, when she rejected mandatory mask-wearing and social distancing, and she was at one point considered one of Trump’s leading candidates to retake the White House.

But Noem became embroiled in controversy last year after publishing an excerpt from a book in which she revealed that she had shot and killed a family dog, a 14-month-old wire-haired pointer named Cricket, in a quarry. of gravel because the dog was “untrainable” and “dangerous to anyone he came into contact with.”

Noem has defended her actions and argued that those anecdotes were intended to show how capable she is of doing some of life’s most gruesome jobs when necessary.

CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez, Eric Bradner and Kaitlan Collins contributed to this report.

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