Tues. 5, 2026, 8:41 PM EST

Kristi Noem’s tenure”https://www.ms.now/news/kristi-noem-out-as-homeland-security-secretary”>atop the Department of Homeland Security ended abruptly Thursday after months of speculation about her future. Noem spent years crafting herself into the perfect avatar of political womanhood in the age of MAGA ascendance. Noem now finds herself plummeting back toward Earth, relegated to a sinecure position that keeps her beholden to President Donald Trump, but far removed from the lofty heights of power and influence that she’d reached.

There is little to praise of Noem’s time at DHS that isn’t likewise damning. She successfully positioned herself to be the figurehead of the president’s central policy, the mass deportation of millions of immigrants while their rights were summarily trampled. And she oversaw a massive influx of funding for her still burgeoning department, even as she reportedly micromanaged spending it with the controversial assistance of her rumored paramour slash chief advisorCorey Lewandowski. (Both have repeatedly denied having a relationship, despite numerous reports to the contrary.)

An absurd focus on style over substance is a hallmark across the Trump administration, but Noem took that disparity to another level. For years, Noem has placed burnishing her own image over the work of governing. She transformed herself into a national figure, while governor of South Dakota, using the position as a megaphone for parroting the Trump agenda in hopes of going viral. Once tapped to lead DHS, she quickly became a laughingstock for her camera-ready appearancesincluding her trip down to the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador to appear in front of incarcerated men while wearing a $50,000 Rolex.

Just months into the job last year, she already appeared over her head at the sprawling department she managed. As I wrote at the time: “As homeland security secretary, Noem wields powers that range all the way from immigration to natural disaster reliefto cybersecurity. It would be a lot of responsibility for one person who is supremely well-versed in all those areas. Noem is not that person.” She did little to make up that ground in the time since, instead whipsawing from crisis to crisismany of her own making, especially those contained internally within DHS.

The most generous read of Noem’s focus on appearances is that it was in some ways preordained. Her power was always limited in some ways by the authority White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller holds over immigration policy. While she held the purse strings to the billions of dollars funneled towards DHS last year, Noem was in many ways little more than a figurehead for Miller’s vision. But even if we were to judge her solely on that role, there were far more missteps than successes.

It was Noem who signed off on a farcical, English-language ad campaign urging self-deportation for undocumented immigrants. It was Noem who repeatedly defied court orders to release detainees like Kilmar Abrego Garcia that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement arrested in their sweeping raids. It was Noem who joined Lewandowski in tapping Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino to lead the aggressive deportation operations that ran amuck in city after city. It was Noem who callously smeared dead Americans as “domestic terrorists” after agents under her authority shot and killed them in Minneapolis. All of this has helped tank Trump’s approval rating on immigration, once considered his top issue.

Meanwhile, Noem made enemies of the lawmakers whose states rely on the disaster aid that she’s curtailed and hamstrung through her aborted attempt to dismantle the Federal Emergency Management Agency. DHS’ inspector general recently said the department “systematically obstructed” his work during her reign. She’s reportedly taken to flying around the country in a plane purchased for deporting immigrants alongside Lewandowski. And she reportedly questioned DHS staffers under polygraph exam for potentially leaking her behavior to the media, a baffling choice for someone who seems so obsessed with public perception.

And yet, reportedly it was none of that that doomed Noem. It was instead her willingness to defend herself when pressed by putting Trump in the hot seat. When asked about her $220 million dollar ad campaign, Noem told senators Tuesday that the president himself had signed off on the expenditures. Trump denied doing so in an interview with Reuters and reportedly was unhappy with being used as a cover. Blaming Trump for taking an unpopular action is a one-way ticket to excommunication in the best of times, let alone when he’s spent months considering her fate and weighing potential replacement.

True to form, Trump’s Truth Social post announcing her departure cast her as an afterthought compared to his effusive praise for her replacement, Sen. Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla. Noem, Trump said, would be instead shunted to the soon-to-be-announced “Shield of the Americas” security initiative as special envoy. Being fully fired might have been more of a kindness, as it would have freed her up to carve a new path — or at least write a tell-all book.

Instead, Noem finds herself powerless and tethered to the man whose coattails she hoped to ride no matter how much devastation she caused in his name. She leaves behind a department less poised to handle threats like terrorism and cyberattacks it was hastily cobbled together to address and a less secure homeland overall. Noem’s transformation into a MAGA darling may have gotten her the job, but it was her lack of competence in even the narrowed scope she was cast in that ultimately doomed her.

Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He focuses on politics and policymaking at the federal level, including Congress and the White House.

Tues. 5, 2026, 7:49 PM EST

ByMary McCord

The Department of Justice both embarrassed and exposed itself this week in its handling of the appeals of federal court orders striking down presidential executive orders against four high-profile law firms.

First, the department embarrassed itself by reversing course and moving Tuesday morning to withdraw motions it had filed Monday evening to dismiss its appeals. Four different judges had held that the executive orders violated the First Amendment because they retaliated against the law firms for representing people and causes President Donald Trump dislikes.

Second, the department exposed itself as a purely political actor because every lawyer in the department knows that the federal court rulings were correct and that the executive orders are indefensible.

The administration’s efforts and the resulting judicial orders are worthy of careful review. The president began blacklisting law firms last March — using executive orders to, among other things, direct federal departments and agencies to prevent the firms’ lawyers from entering federal government buildings and engaging with federal employees; to revoke their lawyers’ security clearances; and to cancel contracts with companies that do business with the firms. Four law firms subject to the orders filed suit.

Four judges appointed by Republican and Democratic presidents swiftly issued temporary restraining orders barring the provisions that made it nearly impossible for the firms to continue to represent clients that had business with the federal government, threatening their very existence. Two of those emergency orders were issued within hours of the law firms seeking them; the other two within a day. The cases all proceeded quickly to final judgment with the same result: All judges concluded that the orders violated the First Amendment rights of the law firms.

(Shamefully, other law firms that wanted to avoid being blacklisted entered into agreements with the administration to provide hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of pro bono work to causes favored by the president, raising ethical issues for the lawyers at those firms and the appearance of pay-to-play.)

The judges who ruled in the law firms’ favor didn’t mince words. Judge John Bates, a George W. Bush appointee, wrotequoting a recent Supreme Court case: “[R]etaliating against firms for the views embodied in their legal work — and thereby seeking to muzzle them going forward — violates the First Amendment’s central command that government may not ‘use the power of the State to punish or suppress disfavored expression.’” He also warned, “More subtle but perhaps more pernicious is the message the order sends to the lawyers whose unalloyed advocacy protects against governmental viewpoint becoming government-imposed orthodoxy. This order, like the others, seeks to chill legal representation the administration doesn’t like, thereby insulating the Executive Branch from the judicial check fundamental to the separation of powers.”

Judge Beryl Howella Barack Obama appointee, put it even more succinctlyborrowing from Shakespeare: “In a cringe-worthy twist on the theatrical phrase ‘Let’s kill all the lawyers,’” the executive order “takes the approach of ‘Let’s kill the lawyers I don’t like,’ sending the clear message: lawyers must stick to the party line, or else.”

Judges, like all lawyers, know why this is so important. As Judge Richard Leon, a George W. Bush appointee, put it“The cornerstone of the American system of justice is an independent judiciary and an independent bar willing to tackle unpopular cases, however daunting.” Without lawyers to advocate for people and causes a president disfavors, even obviously unlawful executive actions could go unchallenged.

With the court decisions stacked so overwhelmingly against the government, one could wonder why the department appealed the lower court rulings in the first place. But it isn’t unusual for the Department of Justice to file a notice of appeal of an adverse ruling even while it is still considering whether to go forward.  Decisions like these, at least when I was in the department, were not made by line-level attorneys. The decision to appeal, especially in high-profile cases, would be made by the solicitor general. Today that’s John Sauer, a former personal attorney to President Trump.

Sauer is a seasoned  advocate. He famously won Trump v. United Statesthe 2024 case in which the Supreme Court gave Trump immunity from criminal prosecution for exercising “core constitutional powers” — including directing the Department of Justice to launch “sham” investigations into election fraud — and at least “presumptive” immunity for other official acts.

Whoever made the decision to dismiss the appeals, you can bet that in this administration it would have been considered at the highest levels. That means it likely would have been blessed by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche — another former personal attorney to Trump — and Attorney General Pam Bondi, who represented Trump in his first impeachment trial. Although the Justice Department has, under their leadership, become a tool for enforcing the president’s political whims, Blanche, Bondi and Sauer are all experienced enough to know that appealing the district court decisions was a sure loser.

Until the recent tariff decisionthe Trump administration has had a winning record at the Supreme Court, and Justice Department leadership presumably preferred to keep it that way. With no hope of winning in the D.C. Circuit — which would have been the next stop for the four cases — and no reason to want to seek review in the Supreme Court and risk losing there, the smart move was to cut their losses and dismiss the appeals. Another reason to think department leadership recognized this: They had already made the decision last spring not to ask the Supreme Court to stay the district courts’ temporary injunctions, something they have done in so many other cases.

They knew then, as we all know now, that the blacklisting orders were textbook First Amendment retaliation.

So what happened to cause this legal about-face?  Was it the headlines calling out the decision to dismiss the appeal? A call from the president or fear of a call from the president? Whatever the specific motivation, there is no reason to think that Justice Department leadership saw the legal merits of the cases change overnight. Instead, the department has embarrassed and exposed itself yet again.