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Celebrate Kristi Noem’s Firing. But Keep Protesting ICE.

Finally, someone in the administration is paying for their cruelty and incompetence.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is sworn in as she testifies during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on oversight of the Department of Homeland Security on March 3, 2026.

Finally, justice for little Cricket. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who boasted in her 2024 book that she shot her 14-month-old puppy for misbehaving, became the first Trump cabinet secretary fired in his second administration. She was quickly replaced by almost-certain-to-be-just-as-bad Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma, but we can afford to enjoy a few rare moments of happiness over Noem’s downfall.

It’s unlikely Cricket factored into Trump’s decision today—it was probably the cumulative effect of Noem’s two-day humiliation by Congress, plus the way she botched Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis and forced the administration to at least draw down if not remove her henchmen. But Cricket got a moment of vindication Tuesday when retiring North Carolina Republican Senator Thom Tillis, a known dog lover, loudly berated the DHS secretary for cruelly shooting her puppy, whom she hadn’t adequately trained, and then citing it as an example of her leadership steeliness in her book.

Now, Tillis could have learned about the Cricket murder before voting to confirm the plainly unqualified Noem last year. But his anger on Tuesday reflected what he’d come to realize: Noem cited that as strong leadership, and it was the same leadership and terrible judgment that led her to falsely defend the murders of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti as a strike against “domestic terrorism,” and to allow her agents to detain legal immigrants, and even some US citizens.

“You decided to kill that dog because you had not invested the appropriate time in training,” Tillis told Noem. “And then you have the audacity to go into a book and say it’s a leadership lesson about tough choices?

“But my point is, those are bad decisions made in the heat of the moment—not unlike what happened up in Minneapolis,” he continued. “We’re an exceptional nation, and one of the reasons we’re exceptional is we expect exceptional leadership, and you’ve demonstrated anything but that.”

Even I hadn’t made the connection between her Cricket cruelty and her cavalier approach to human suffering as DHS secretary—and I wrote about Cricket’s murder when her book came out.

Tillis wasn’t the only Republican........

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