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 Homeland Security, a sprawling department that oversees agencies such as US Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the US Secret Service.
In a statement after Saturday’s vote, Noem said she will prioritize securing the southern border and fixing “our broken immigration system.”
“I will work every day to keep all Americans safe and secure. One of my top priorities is achieving President Trump’s mandate from the American people to secure our southern border and fix our broken immigration system,” Noem’s statement said.
“The Trump Administration will once-again empower our brave men and women in law enforcement to do their jobs and remove criminal aliens and illegal gangs from our country,” she continued.
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 challenges.
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.
This story has been updated with new reporting.
CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez, Eric Bradner and Kaitlan Collins contributed to this report.
