By Clare Foran, Morgan Rimmer and Annie Grayer, CNN
(CNN) — The Senate voted on Saturday morning to confirm Kristi Noem as President Donald Trump’s Homeland Security secretary, installing a longtime Trump ally at the helm of an agency poised to play a central role in the president’s promised immigration crackdown.
The vote was bipartisan, 59-34.
Noem has served as governor of South Dakota since 2019 and is a former state legislator and four-term congresswoman. She will now be tasked with leading the Department of Homeland Security, a sprawling agency that oversees everything from US Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement to the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the US Secret Service.
“The mission and the success of DHS is more critical 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 critical infrastructure to make sure that we’re protected against cyberattacks, respond to natural disasters, and also terrorism.”
Calling border security a “top priority,” Noem said that Trump was elected with “a clear mandate” mandate on immigration. “Getting criminal aliens off of our streets and out of the country will help American communities be safer again,” she said.
Trump began his second term in office by taking a series of sweeping immigration executive actions that included declaring a national emergency at the US southern border and kicking off the process to end birthright citizenship, a move that prompted almost immediate legal challenge.
In addition to immigration, Noem addressed a range of other issues during her confirmation hearing. In response to questions from Democrats, she said that under her leadership “there will be no political bias” when it comes to disaster relief and there must be a focus on domestic terrorism, saying that “homegrown terrorism is on the rise,” as she called the deadly New Year’s truck attack in New Orleans “a horrific event.”
Noem’s national profile grew during the Covid-19 pandemic, when she rejected mask mandates and social distancing, and she was at one time considered a top contender to be a potential running mate for Trump in his bid to win back the White House.
But Noem found herself caught up in controversy last year following publication of an excerpt of a book in which she revealed she’d shot and killed a family dog, a 14-month-old wirehair pointer named Cricket, in a gravel pit because the dog was “untrainable” and “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with.”
Noem has defended her actions and argued that those anecdotes were meant to show how capable she is of doing some of the more gruesome jobs in life when necessary.
CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez, Eric Bradner and Kaitlan Collins contributed to this report.
The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2025 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
Senate confirms Kristi Noem as homeland security secretary, a key role as Trump vows immigration crackdown News Channel 3-12.
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