The Fall Gal

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, January 28, 2026

 

I understand why many Democrats and now a few Republicans have settled on Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem as their preferred scalp for the killing of Alex Pretti.

 

No one in the Trump administration has worked harder to make authoritarianism glamorous. One day she’s out in the field with immigration officers cutting Instagram videos, impeccably done up in full hair and makeup and a smart bulletproof vest. The next day she’s posing in front of bare-chested prisoners in an El Salvadoran gulag, showing them off like prized animals in her private zoo.

 

Despite the best sartorial efforts of Greg Bovino, she’s become the face of glib fascist chic. If ICE’s behavior in Minneapolis often feels like a deliberate spectacle of lawless, domineering postliberalism, who else should we blame but DHS’s showboating secretary and her taste for performative ruthlessness?

 

Noem is also personally obnoxious even if you exclude the occasional puppy-whacking. You would think she’d be one of the more professional and disciplined members of this kakistocracy, having served first in Congress and later as governor of South Dakota. But there she was, smearing Pretti and Renee Good in public remarks hours after they were killed by falsely accusing the latter of “domestic terrorism” and the former of trying to inflict “maximum damage” on immigration agents.

 

The least she could have done to make amends was take responsibility for her errors, but no luck there either. Reportedly she’s whined to confidants that she was just following orders from the president and Stephen Miller. The buck stops … somewhere over there, apparently.

 

It’s no wonder that some Republicans in Congress have grown sick of her. “I would not support her again, and I think it probably is time for her to step down,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski said Tuesday. Sen. Thom Tillis went further, accusing Noem of “amateurish assistant-manager-sort of thought processes” and observing that “if I were in her position, I can’t think of any point of pride over the last year.” Both voted to confirm her, of course.

 

I share their disdain for her. But I’m also of the antiquated opinion that when members of Congress take a stand—and they’re badly out of practice, I realize—that stand should be geared toward achieving something meaningful. What meaningful thing would be accomplished if Kristi Noem got canned?

 

Firing her would be a simulacrum of accountability, a “quick fix” to Minneapolis. Americans shouldn’t be allowed to delude themselves that the culture of impunity they’ve empowered can be undone so easily.

 

No honor among thieves.

 

No one calling for Noem’s ouster believes she’s the driving force behind ICE’s behavior. She’s being targeted only because she’s the highest-ranking figure in our immigration bureaucracy who might conceivably be stripped of her power and let go.

 

Trump won’t be stripped of his power. You know as well as I do that Republicans wouldn’t impeach him if he had fired the shots into Alex Pretti’s back himself. Nor will Miller be stripped of his power. He’s less an adviser than a spirit animal for the president, a sort of human operating system for Trumpism. Firing him would amount to uninstalling the postliberal ideological software on which the entire administration runs.

 

And of course the diehard MAGA base that’s desperate to see protesters in Minneapolis clubbed won’t be stripped of its power. That’s been the dilemma for Republicans like Tillis and Murkowski for 10 years. How do you hold a renegade White House accountable when your own voters clamor for unaccountability? In a “government of, by, and for louts,” to quote George Will, the insuperable problem is and has always been the “for” part.

 

None of that will change if Noem hits the bricks. On the contrary, “if she goes, we’re going to get just another bad apple,” as Democratic Sen. Gary Peters put it. Remember that the president spent most of his first term filling Cabinet vacancies with lower-caliber “acting” directors who answered only to him, and there’s zero reason to think his M.O. will change now. A new “acting” DHS secretary would more likely resemble Matt Gaetz than James Mattis.

 

So the “Kristi must go” campaign is an absurdity. It’s a knee-jerk response by some Republicans to the discombobulating situation in which they find themselves, forced by a massive public outcry to pantomime a sudden interest in accountability for immigration officials after spending a year letting the White House turn ICE into an imperious secret goon squad right under their noses.

 

That’s also the only way I can explain the panicky, no-honor-among-thieves finger-pointing inside the White House today.

 

Team Trump appears to have earnestly believed that its 2024 victory reflected a popular mandate to enforce immigration law the way a low-IQ MAGA Twitter chud with a “Pepe the Frog” avatar would. Having now learned the hard way that it didn’t, the major players are scrambling to fault each other for Pretti’s death and the chuddish spin about it afterward. Per Axios, an unnamed White House official is blaming Bovino, Noem is blaming Miller, and Miller himself is blaming Customs and Border Patrol for supplying bad information and not following protocol.

 

Trump is getting in on it, too. A senior White House official whispered to the New York Times today that the president warned his deputies back in September to “use a more targeted approach when it came to his deportation campaign” and “focus on the criminals” instead of raiding businesses to run up their numbers, as Miller and Noem preferred. Turns out it’s not fair to blame Donald Trump for the excesses of, er, Donald Trump’s immigration policy.

 

The blame game is what happens when the leadership of a political movement that believes immigration agents should operate with absolute impunity is forced in an eye-blink by political circumstances to pretend that it doesn’t.

 

The question of who’s really to blame was correctly answered by Nate Silver after Miller attributed Pretti’s killing to a breakdown in the Border Patrol’s tactical “protocol.” Could it be, Silver wondered, that they were willing to violate protocol because “they thought White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller would protect them by saying the civilians they killed while exercising their civil rights were ‘assassins’ or ‘domestic terrorists’?”

 

A goon squad that was designed to behave like a goon squad behaved like a goon squad. Kristi Noem didn’t cause that problem and removing Kristi Noem won’t solve it.

 

But it gets worse.

 

No recourse.

 

A number of critics observed lately that ICE now operates so far above the law in America that victims of its brutality may not have legal remedies available to them in any form. At any level of government.

 

Dispatch contributor Jesse Singal worried in a Substack post Monday that if the judicial system can’t restrain immigration agents, renegade protesters might conclude that extrajudicial retribution is their only option. “We are well on our way toward a situation in which the average person has no legitimate recourse if someone they care about is killed by the federal government,” he wrote. “This is a whole different level of Trumpism.”

 

David French fleshed out that point in a column published after Renee Good was killed. No matter which route her family takes to seek justice for her death, he explained, they’re likely out of luck. Federal prosecutors in the president’s Justice Department won’t investigate the shooting. A future Democratic administration could, but Trump will likely immunize ICE agents by pardoning them before he leaves office. State prosecutors probably can’t do anything because of precedents that grant federal agents immunity from state charges in most circumstances. And Good’s family almost certainly can’t sue her killer thanks to court rulings limiting federal officers’ civil liability.

 

In America, the federal government basically gets to choose whether the citizens to whom it nominally answers should receive redress for injustices perpetrated by federal agents. How it chooses will depend not on the law but largely on its own sense of honor and accountability. If you’re stupid enough to elect a group of rabid postliberal werewolves with no regard for either of those concepts then you’ll get, well, ICE, an agency that can kill you where you stand and know that there’s not a blessed thing you can do about it.

 

It’s the darkest nightmare of “Don’t Tread on Me” conservatism come blazingly to life—except, because agents are targeting the right’s cultural enemies, Republican reaction ranges mostly from “mildly concerned” to “kill ’em all.” Bear it in mind amid the lectures we’re now getting about Democrats in Minnesota being engaged in a project to “nullify” immigration enforcement. In a country where joining ICE functionally gives you authority to shoot someone in the face without consequences, I’d say we slipped meaningfully down the legal “nullification” slope some time ago.

 

And it doesn’t much seem to trouble our great Republican patriots in Congress, does it?

 

When I hear Thom Tillis and Lisa Murkowski say, “Fire Kristi Noem,” it sounds uncannily like, “I prefer an empty gesture that Republican voters won’t care about to passing meaningful legislative reforms that will pit me squarely against them and Trump.” Congress can’t do much about the president’s pardon power, but it surely could try to create some form of legal accountability for federal officers in hopes of deterring future abuses. I realize that GOP incumbents hoping to survive their next primary are now basically limited to policy preferences ranging from pro-fascist to anti-anti-fascist, but the United States cannot survive masked secret policemen walking around with a license to kill. 

 

Failing that, if congressional Republicans remain intent on papering over the problem by calling for the firing of administration officials, the least they could do is have the dignity to identify the true motive force behind ICE’s poisonous culture—Miller—instead of scapegoating so-called “ICE Barbie.” Tillis, who’s retiring, has done so but his colleagues who still have skin in the political game have kept quiet so far, doubtless believing that to antagonize Miller would be tantamount to antagonizing Trump himself.

 

And so the “fire Noem” push ends up looking unmistakably like learned helplessness, the psychological malady in which abuse victims become convinced that there’s nothing they can do to free themselves from their predicament. Republicans are scapegoating an official who doesn’t seem particularly close to the president and who probably doesn’t have much influence over policy in lieu of having to do something productive that might antagonize feral right-wingers and their more feral leader.

 

It sounds like the president is prepared to ignore them, too. “By Monday night, [Noem] was in the Oval Office, meeting with Mr. Trump,” the Times noticed. “By Tuesday the president was telling reporters that her job was safe and that the media should focus more on her role in shutting down illegal immigration into the country.” I suspect Erick Erickson is right that Noem will ultimately be “Tulsi Gabbarded,” kept in her role for the sake of denying the White House’s critics a scalp but largely excluded from important decisions under her purview.

 

And if he is right, and Noem does stay on, I’ll be glad. For one thing, there’s a slender chance that House Democrats will get help from a few vulnerable House Republicans and muster the votes to impeach her, which in turn would force Senate Republicans to take political ownership of ICE’s abuses by having to explain to voters why Noem shouldn’t be removed. They deserve that. Trump firing her would spare them.

 

But if impeachment doesn’t happen, I still like the idea of keeping Noem around as a sort of mascot of impunity. Let Americans be reminded whenever they see her that the government they elected can’t even pretend to care enough about immigration agents killing Americans to replace an underwhelming apparatchik who leads DHS with some equally underwhelming apparatchik. Her continued presence in the administration would function as a sort of PSA that the country is getting precisely the sort of vicious, unapologetically unaccountable hoodlums it voted for.

 

Given all the deceit the Trump team engages in, a bit of bracing honesty on that point would be appreciated.