2026-03-06T08:00:33.633Z / CNN
经过一年的争议，克里斯蒂·诺姆的命运在短短几天内就被决定。这一切始于《国会山报》的一个预警。
参议员约翰·肯尼迪周日向白宫透露，当国土安全部部长诺姆出现在司法委员会面前时，他不会手下留情。这位路易斯安那州的共和党人计划就其机构花费2.2亿美元开展的广告宣传活动向诺姆提出尖锐问题，该活动显著突出了她本人。
周二，在镜头和满场观众面前，肯尼迪缓和了他的提问语气。正确审查南部边境人员并不算是种族主义，对吧？边境巡逻队和移民与海关执法局都需要这样做，不是吗？诺姆肯定地回答。“好的，”肯尼迪说，“我只是想把对她的祝贺记录在案。”
随后，他兑现了自己的计划，连续追问2.2亿美元广告活动的问题，以及这如何与诺姆承诺根除机构浪费的说法相矛盾。
他不止一次询问特朗普是否批准了这场“挥霍”，诺姆才给出直接回答：“嗯哼，是的。”
事实证明，这个回答是这位四面楚歌的内阁部长的最后一根稻草。当晚晚些时候，肯尼迪接到了特朗普的电话。肯尼迪告诉CNN，总统“非常生气”。
“关于总统是否A）知情和B）同意，她的说法和总统的说法截然不同，”肯尼迪说。（特朗普周四告诉NBC新闻，他并不知道这场广告宣传活动。“我对此并不满意，”他说。）
正是在与肯尼迪的同一次通话中，特朗普提出了一个替代人选的想法：他觉得参议院同事、俄克拉荷马州的马克韦恩·穆林怎么样？
“我告诉他我很喜欢马克韦恩，”肯尼迪回忆他们的对话时说。即便他不喜欢穆林——这位前综合格斗选手——他补充道：“我不会这么说，因为他会揍我的。”
到了周四，特朗普已与国会山的其他盟友讨论了替换诺姆的想法，最终选定穆林，并在中午的社交媒体帖子中宣布了这一任命，此时这位参议员甚至还没来得及和妻子商量这个机会。
特朗普发布消息几分钟后——其中提到诺姆新头衔为“美洲盾牌特使”——她原计划在纳什维尔的舞台上向友好的警察听众发表预先准备好的讲话，该活动是在中士慈善协会主要城市会议上举行的。
三位知情人士告诉CNN，诺姆在抵达纳什维尔活动现场时得知了自己被解雇的消息。其中两位消息人士称，特朗普直接致电诺姆告知其决定。
多位出席会议的当地执法官员告诉CNN，诺姆抵达会议后在车内停留了几分钟。然后她下车进入接待室，与在场的工作人员见面。在诺姆在后台等待演讲时，她被解雇的新闻警报开始在工作人员的手机上弹出。
在整个演讲中，诺姆没有提及自己离开该机构的事。事实上，她的一些言论暗示她在该部门仍有前瞻性角色——尽管她确实模糊地提到特朗普为她选定的新角色将侧重于打击毒品走私。
诺姆周四下午向员工发送了一份备忘录，称她的角色是“一生中的荣誉”。
归根结底，导致诺姆丢工作的并非仅仅是明尼阿波利斯发生的雷妮·古德和亚历克斯·普雷蒂被杀事件。也不是她过早将这两名受害者——一位三个孩子的母亲和一名退伍军人护士——描绘成潜在恐怖分子和有抱负的杀手的即时反应。也不是她据称与无薪下属科里·莱万多夫斯基（两人均已婚并否认存在关系）发生的性关系，不是为高管专机花费过高，也不是她领导的机构发出的充满白人至上主义隐晦暗示、对移民描述错误百出的公开信息。
但这些争议事件逐一累积——而诺姆又将特朗普的名字拖入其中。
周二之后，一名白宫官员告诉CNN，显然“是时候”让诺姆离开了。
“替换克里斯蒂是因为她多次领导失误的累积，包括明尼苏达州事件的后续影响、广告活动、不忠指控、员工管理不善，以及她与包括边境巡逻队和移民与海关执法局在内的其他机构负责人持续不和，”该官员表示。
他们补充道：“克里斯蒂的麻烦可悲地掩盖并分散了政府极为受欢迎的移民议程的注意力，而该议程将继续全力推进。”
长期以来一直让一些白宫高级助手感到不满的莱万多夫斯基预计将与诺姆一同离职。
在她的职位上，诺姆负责执行总统标志性的竞选承诺：大规模驱逐移民。她的行事风格从一开始就很张扬。她被拍到与移民与海关执法局一同乘车执行移民执法行动，被拍摄在拉什莫尔山骑马拍摄广告，并在数百名委内瑞拉人被送往萨尔瓦多超级监狱后，在囚犯牢房前摆姿势拍照。
特朗普经常公开称赞她。但在内部，她的机构仍面临来自白宫的巨大交付压力。联邦移民当局未能达到白宫设定的每日3000次逮捕配额，尽管政府扩大了可能被逮捕的人员范围，包括由边境巡逻队高级官员格雷戈里·博维诺领导的针对民主党主导城市的争议性突袭行动。
官员们表示，这种激进且有时混乱的做法加剧了部门内部的紧张关系。第一次公开谴责似乎来自白宫边境事务负责人汤姆·霍曼被派往明尼苏达州解决大量联邦移民执法人员涌入导致的问题。
但部门内部的问题超出了她对移民事务的处理。她还加强了对部门预算的控制，下令所有超过10万美元的合同和拨款都必须经过她的审批——诺姆多次为这一做法辩护，称其旨在削减浪费。
诺姆的成本控制导致去年夏天受灾地区的资金救济延迟——这种延迟让人联想到她担任南达科他州州长期间的类似争议。
过去一年里，诺姆推动了对国土安全部下属的联邦紧急事务管理局（FEMA）的激进改革，她曾誓言要“解散”这个机构，称其臃肿、有党派倾向且效率低下。
据现任和前任官员称，在她的任期内，FEMA失去了许多最有经验的领导人，约三分之一的固定员工离职。诺姆及其团队削减了合同、拨款、培训和差旅——官员们表示，这些举措引发了人们对该机构应对另一场重大灾难能力的担忧。
多名国土安全部官员对诺姆的离职表示松了口气。虽然许多人对总统的任命感到震惊，但一些人认为这是不可避免的。
“我认为这早就该发生了。她从一开始就不适合这个职位，”一名国土安全部官员告诉CNN。
另一名官员表示，诺姆在被指利用职位谋取私利后“付出了代价”。
官员们称，她离职后最受期待的变化是部门迎来一位行事稳健的领导者，此前部门一直被莱万多夫斯基频繁的解雇和斥责所困扰。
官员们预计移民政策和优先事项在部门内将基本保持不变。一名特朗普政府官员告诉CNN，她的离职可能是霍曼的“重置”机会，霍曼被派往明尼阿波利斯应对古德和普雷蒂被杀事件，他的移民执法方法更具针对性。美国官员表示，霍曼和诺姆近几个月几乎没有交流。
“这标志着国土安全部内部完全不必要的、破坏性的小团体内战终于结束，是时候让汤姆·霍曼和一位成熟的国土安全部部长重新整合团队，以更快更好地完成特朗普总统的使命，”一名特朗普政府官员告诉CNN。
在联邦紧急事务管理局内部，许多员工——从高级官员到普通职员——都为诺姆的离职欢呼。总部多名员工描述，消息传出时办公室里响起了明显的欢呼声。
“总部的氛围是如释重负，”一名高级FEMA官员告诉CNN，“我们有一段时间没见过这么高的士气了。”
据官员称，诺姆的团队在FEMA员工中营造了一种恐惧文化，对一些人进行测谎以寻找泄密者，并突然无解释地将其他人解职。
“她完全摧毁了这个机构，迫使一些应急管理领域最优秀和最有经验的人才辞职，无视卡特里娜飓风等灾难中吸取的所有惨痛教训，使我们在灾难前、中、后都无法做好充分准备帮助民众，”另一名高级FEMA官员说，“她造成的损害需要几十年才能修复。”
特朗普选择穆林作为其移民议程的可靠支持者，白宫称其应“尽快得到确认”。这位俄克拉荷马州参议员将接手一个预计将定义特朗普遗产和他自己政治生涯的机构。
特朗普宣布穆林将担任国土安全部部长后不久，穆林表示他的重点是“维护国土安全”。
“我们有很多工作要做，让国土安全部为美国人民服务，”穆林说。
穆林曾表示，在美国出生的非法移民子女应与父母一同被驱逐，以避免分离。他称人们应随时携带证件以防被移民官员拦下。他为移民官员在导致古德和普雷蒂死亡的事件中的行为进行了辩护。
但他与特朗普在一个具体问题上的立场——2021年1月6日美国国会大厦袭击事件——一直较为微妙。当时穆林正在众议院任职，他帮助封锁了众议院楼层的门，并表示他威胁要与任何突破的骚乱者发生肢体冲突。
在特朗普考虑在选举后赦免这些骚乱者时，穆林在CNN敦促他“在行动前先看看事实”，而特朗普确实赦免了他们之后，这位俄克拉荷马州参议员表示，国会大厦的围困无疑是一场“骚乱”和“可怕的一天”。
“然而，”他说，通过选举特朗普，美国人选择了“向前看”。
诺姆未来的去向尚不清楚。但一些参议院共和党人正乐于借此机会翻开新的一页。
在穆林新职位宣布后，共和党参议员汤姆·蒂利斯（一位动物爱好者，本周听证会上曾就诺姆2024年回忆录中关于她射杀调皮小狗的内容与诺姆争执）在社交媒体上分享了穆林家人的照片，称这位参议员“是个好人，是领导国土安全部的绝佳人选”。
“另一个大优点：他喜欢狗，”蒂利斯写道。
CNN的克里斯汀·霍尔姆斯和约翰·米勒对此报道有贡献。
How Kristi Noem finally lost Trump — and her job
2026-03-06T08:00:33.633Z / CNN
After a year of controversies, Kristi Noem’s fate was sealed over just a few days. It started with a heads-up from the Hill.
Sen. John Kennedy let the White House know Sunday that he was not going to go easy on the Homeland Security secretary when she appeared before the Judiciary Committee. The Louisiana Republican planned to pepper Noem with tough questions about her agency’s lavish spending on an advertising campaign that prominently showcased her.
Before cameras and a packed audience Tuesday, Kennedy eased into his line of questioning. Properly vetting people at the southern border isn’t racist, right? Both Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement are needed to do that, are they not? Noem responded in the affirmative. “OK,” Kennedy said. “I just wanted to get my congratulations on the record.”
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He then delivered on his plan, unleashing a series of questions about the $220 million ad campaign and how that squared with Noem’s stated promise to root out waste from her agency.
He had to ask more than once whether Trump approved that spending spree before Noem provided a direct answer: “Mmhmm, yes.”
That response, it turned out, was the embattled Cabinet secretary’s final straw. Kennedy got a call from Trump later that evening. The president, Kennedy told CNN, “was pissed.”
“Her version and the president’s version of whether the president, A) was informed and B) consented are decidedly different,” Kennedy said. (Trump told NBC News Thursday that he hadn’t known about the advertising campaign. “I wasn’t thrilled with it,” he said.)
It was in that same conversation with Kennedy that Trump floated an idea for a replacement: What did he think about his colleague in the Senate, Oklahoma’s Markwayne Mullin?
“I told him I’m very fond of Markwayne,” Kennedy recalled of their conversation. Even if he didn’t like Mullin, a former mixed-martial arts fighter, he added: “I wouldn’t say otherwise because he’d whoop my ass.”
By Thursday, Trump had ruminated with other allies on Capitol Hill about replacing Noem, finally selecting Mullin for the job and announcing it in a midday social media post before the senator could even talk to his wife about the opportunity.
Minutes after Trump posted the news — including a new title for Noem as “Special Envoy for the Shield of the Americas” — she was scheduled to step on a stage in Nashville to deliver preplanned remarks to a friendly audience of police officers at the Sergeant Benevolent Association Major Cities Conference.
Noem learned of her firing as she was arriving at the Nashville event, three sources familiar with the matter told CNN. Two of the sources said Trump called Noem directly to inform her of his decision.
Noem remained in the car for several minutes upon arrival at the conference, multiple local law enforcement officials present at the conference told CNN. She then got out of the car and went into the reception room where she met staffers who were present. While Noem was backstage waiting to give her speech, the news alert that she had been fired began to cross on staffers’ phones.
Throughout her speech, Noem made no mention of her departure from the agency. In fact, some of her remarks indicated she had a forward-looking role at the department — though she did make some vague allusions to a new role Trump had selected her for focusing on drug trafficking.
Noem sent a memo to employees Thursday afternoon, describing her role as the “honor of my life.”
In the end, it wasn’t the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis alone that cost Noem her job. Nor was it her immediate reaction to prematurely paint both the mom-of-three and the veterans’ nurse as wannabe terrorists and aspiring cop killers. It wasn’t the sexual relationship she allegedly had with her unpaid subordinate, Corey Lewandowski (both are married and have denied the relationship), the exorbitant spending on executive jets, or the public messaging from her agency which was riddled with White nationalist dog whistles and error-prone descriptions of immigrants.
But each of those controversies accumulated — and then Noem dragged Trump’s name into it.
After Tuesday, a White House official told CNN, it became clear that “it was time” for Noem to go.
“Replacing Kristi was based on the culmination of her many unfortunate leadership failures including the fallout in Minnesota, the ad campaign, the allegations of infidelity, the mismanagement of her staff, and her constant feuding with the heads of other agencies, including CBP and ICE,” the official said.
They added: “Kristi’s drama sadly overshadowed and distracted from the Administration’s extremely popular immigration agenda, which will continue full force.”
Lewandowski, who has long frustrated some top White House aides, is expected to depart with Noem.
In her post, Noem was charged with executing the president’s signature campaign pledge: carrying out mass deportations. And her approach was flashy from the outset. She was photographed on ride alongs with ICE on immigration enforcement operations, filmed riding horseback at Mt. Rushmore for ads, and posing in front of a cell of detainees at El Salvador’s mega prison after the US sent hundreds of Venezuelans there.
Trump often publicly praised her. But internally, her agency still faced tremendous pressure from the White House to deliver. Federal immigration authorities fell short of White House-imposed daily quotas of 3,000 arrests, even as the administration cast a wide net over who could be subject to arrest, including controversial sweeps in Democratic-led cities led by top Border Patrol official Gregory Bovino.
The aggressive — and at times, haphazard — approach fueled tensions within the department, according to officials. The first public rebuke appeared to come with White House border czar Tom Homan’s deployment to Minnesota to resolve issues associated with the massive surge of federal agents for immigration enforcement.
But issues within the department extended beyond her handling of immigration. She also tightened her grip on her department’s purse strings, ordering that every contract and grant over $100,000 must cross her desk for approval — a move that Noem has frequently defended as intended to cut down on waste.
Noem’s cost controls led to a delay in monetary relief for areas decimated by natural disasters last summer — delays that echoed similar controversies during her tenure as South Dakota’s governor.
Over the past year, Noem drove an aggressive overhaul of FEMA, the disaster relief agency within DHS she had vowed to dismantle, calling it bloated, partisan and ineffective.
During her tenure, FEMA lost many of its most experienced leaders and about a third of its permanent workforce, according to current and former officials. Noem and her team cut contracts, grants, training and travel — moves that, officials say, raised fears the agency would struggle to handle another major catastrophe.
Multiple Homeland Security officials expressed relief over Noem’s ouster. While many were stunned by the president’s announcement, some saw it as inevitable.
“I think it’s long overdue. She wasn’t qualified for the position from the beginning,” a Homeland Security official told CNN.
Another Homeland Security official said Noem “paid the price” after what they alleged was her exploiting the role for personal gain.
The most anticipated change following her departure, officials said, is a steady hand at the helm of the department that had been wracked with firings and frequent reprimanding from Lewandowski.
Officials anticipate that immigration policies and priorities are largely expected to remain the same at the department. One Trump administration official told CNN her departure will likely serve as a reset for Homan, who was deployed to Minneapolis in response to Good and Pretti’s killing and whose approach to immigration enforcement is more targeted. Homan and Noem have rarely spoken to each other in recent months, US officials told CNN.
“This signals the very welcome end of a totally needless, damaging petty ego civil war within DHS and a full reset for Tom Homan and an adult DHS secretary to build a unified team that will get President Trump’s missions accomplished faster and better,” a Trump administration official told CNN.
Inside FEMA, many employees — from high-ranking officials to rank-and-file staff — celebrated news of Noem’s departure. Multiple staffers inside headquarters described audible cheers across the office when the news broke.
“The mood across headquarters is relief,” one high-ranking FEMA official told CNN. “We haven’t seen the morale this high in a while.”
Her team imposed a culture of fear among FEMA staffers, officials said, polygraphing some in a hunt for leakers and abruptly removing others from their positions without explanation.
“She oversaw the complete destruction of the agency, forced the resignation of some of the brightest minds and most experienced people in emergency management, ignored every one of the hard learned lessons from Katrina and put us in a place where we are no longer well prepared to help people before, during or after disasters,” another high-ranking FEMA official said. “It will take decades to fix the damage she has caused.”
In Mullin, Trump has selected a reliable champion of his immigration agenda whom the White House says should be confirmed “as quickly as possible.” The Oklahoma senator will inherit an agency that is expected to define both Trump’s legacy and his own.
Shortly after Trump announced his intention to have Mullin serve as Homeland Security secretary, Mullin said his focus would be to “keep the homeland secure.”
“There’s a lot of work we can do to get the Department of Homeland Security working for the American people,” Mullin said.
Mullin has suggested that children born in the US to undocumented immigrants should be deported with their parents so as not to be separated. He has said that people should be expected to carry their papers in case they are stopped by immigration officers. He defended immigration officers’ actions in the incidents that led to the deaths of both Good and Pretti.
But his and Trump’s alignment on one specific issue – the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, has been more tenuous. During the attack, Mullin, who was serving in the House at the time, helped to barricade the doors to the House floor and later said he threatened to physically engage any rioters who broke through.
As Trump was mulling the possibility of pardoning those rioters after his election, Mullin urged him on CNN to “look at the facts before he does something,” and after Trump did pardon them, the Oklahoma senator said there was “no question” the siege of the Capitol was a “riot” and a “horrible day.”
“However,” he said, by electing Trump, Americans have chosen to “move on.”
It’s unclear how Noem will move on. But some Republicans in the Senate are relishing the chance to turn over a new leaf.
After Mullin’s new position was announced, Republican Sen. Thom Tillis, an animal lover who during this week’s hearing sparred with Noem over admissions in her 2024 memoir that she shot her misbehaving puppy, shared a picture of Mullin’s family to social media, saying the senator “is a great guy and a great choice to lead DHS.”
“Another big positive: he likes dogs,” Tillis wrote.
CNN’s Kristen Holmes and John Miller contributed.
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