Dog-killing South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem fearmongered about the threat immigrants pose to the United States and lied about the California wildfires during the confirmation hearing for her nomination to lead the Department of Homeland Security Friday.
As head of DHS, Noem would be in charge of Customs and Border Patrol and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which helps respond to natural and manmade disasters. Her answers about how she would handle both of those areas should scare everyone.
During the hearing, Noem lied that the U.S. border is “open,” and claimed that “the No. 1 threat to our homeland security is the southern border.”
Of course, the border is obviously not open. In fact, border crossings have dramatically declined in recent months, achieving similar levels as those during Donald Trump’s first term.
What’s more, the head of the FBI has actually said that homegrown extremists are the biggest terror threat, and that China’s cyber program and its impact on U.S. infrastructure is a bigger danger to the United States than immigrants crossing the border.
Aside from fearmongering about immigrants, Noem also refused to say whether she’d withhold disaster relief if Trump asked her to—a relevant question as Trump and Republicans have said California should not receive financial assistance to help recover from the devastating fires.
“If President Trump were to say to you, ‘We’re going to withhold money from Connecticut or Michigan or any of the states, Iowa, because we don’t like the governor or we don’t like the politics of the state,’ you would stand up to him and say, ‘Mr. President, we need to allocate that money’?” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, asked Noem.
She refused to respond, saying that she couldn’t answer a hypothetical question.
But it’s not hypothetical, since Trump tried to do just that during his first term, when California was reeling from another wave of devastating wildfires.
As Politico reported in October:
Mark Harvey, who was Trump’s senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council staff, told E&E News on Wednesday that Trump initially refused to approve disaster aid for California after deadly wildfires in 2018 because of the state’s Democratic leanings.
But Harvey said Trump changed his mind after Harvey pulled voting results to show him that heavily damaged Orange County, California, had more Trump supporters than the entire state of Iowa.
“We went as far as looking up how many votes he got in those impacted areas … to show him these are people who voted for you,” said Harvey, who recently endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris alongside more than 100 other Republican former national security officials.
“I assume you agree, withholding disaster relief is a violation of duty and law,” Blumenthal pressed Noam.
“Leadership has consequences,” she said in a chilling response.
Blumenthal: I assume you agree, withholding disaster relief is a violation of duty and law DHS nominee Noem: Leadership has consequences pic.twitter.com/fOLdWPx13O— FactPost (@factpostnews) January 17, 2025
Noem went on to lie about the response to California’s wildfires, claiming that somehow Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom is responsible for the devastating impacts of this natural disaster—echoing the baseless claims of Trump and other Republicans.
“I wish we would have had different leadership or a different governor in California,” Noem said.
However, firefighters say that humans could not have stopped the fires that ravaged the state.
“Wildfires like this, driven by 70 to 100 mph winds, couldn’t be ‘put out’ if every firefighter in the West were in Los Angeles,” retired firefighter Riva Duncan wrote in an op-ed for MSNBC.
And, as UCLA water resource expert Greg Pierce told CNN, “I don’t know a water system in the world that is … prepared for this type of event.”
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