Updated March 3, 2026 at 12:46 PM AST
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is testifying before members of the Senate amid a pause in funding to her agency and increased scrutiny of her leadership.
The Department of Homeland Security has been shut down for nearly a month after lawmakers failed to negotiate a budget deal to fund the agency and agree on changes to how immigration officers operate.
Noem, in addition to highlighting the Trump administration's accomplishments under this administration, told lawmakers on the Senate Judiciary Committee how the shutdown is affecting regular Americans, including making air travel more difficult.
"Senate Democrats who have chosen not to fund the department and have held this department hostage," she said in her opening remarks. "As a result, critical national security missions, including border security, immigration enforcement, aviation security, disaster response, cyber security and the protection of critical infrastructure are all being strained," she said, adding that the agency is also struggling to prepare for World Cup security.
Watch Noem testify at 9 a.m. ET Tuesday:
But the focus is on how Noem has been pursuing President Trump's mass deportation efforts in his second term. DHS is the agency that oversees both Customs and Border Protection, or CBP, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.
Republicans called for the hearing just days after CBP officers shot and killed 37-year-old Alex Pretti in Minneapolis in January. Pretti was the second U.S. citizen killed by federal immigration officers in the city after Renee Macklin Good's death at the hands of an ICE officer earlier in the month. Noem drew bipartisan scrutiny for labeling Good and Pretti domestic terrorists shortly after their deaths.
Last month, leadership of ICE and CBP said neither they nor anyone under their command had provided information to Noem to lead to that conclusion. When asked by Sen. Dick Durbin about what information lead to those statements, Noem said had reports from agents on the ground.
Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said ahead of Noem's testimony that he looked forward to hearing how she would address that violence.
"Let me be clear, one death is too many. But officers should never be threatened or harmed while enforcing our laws. And there is a clear difference between the conduct protected by the First Amendment and unlawful obstruction," Grassley said. "From my perspective, I believe immigration enforcement and dignity aren't mutually exclusive."
Legal experts have told NPR that much of the activity the government says amounts to obstruction — like observing and filming immigration officers — is constitutionally protected.
Some Democratic senators lamented the five-week gap between Pretti's death and the hearing.
"With all of the violence and deaths involving DHS, the Secretary is apparently in no hurry to account for her mismanagement of this national crisis. And she expects us to rubber stamp her record-breaking budget in the meantime," Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois, the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement in late January.
Noem faced bipartisan criticism over how her agency handled the immigration surge in Minnesota, where about 3,000 federal officers were deployed before a recent drawdown. The immigration operation has created an atmosphere of intense fear and chaos in the state. During the hearing, Noem said 650 DHS agents remain in the state and they are focusing on fraud-related investigations.
Although there has been some bipartisan scrutiny of Noem's leadership at the hearing, lawmakers largely stuck to party lines. Democrats were critical of Noem's spending, arrest tactics and deportation targets. Republicans broadly defended the administration's goal of mass deportations.
Earlier this year, immigration officers for weeks also deployed aggressive tactics against Minnesotans protesting and observing their actions.
Regarding the shutdown, Democrats have spelled out a list of 10 demands to change the behavior of immigration officers, but finding consensus has been tough. Some asks, such as requiring immigration officers to wear body cameras, have bipartisan support.
There is also some bipartisan interest in looking into the kinds of warrants DHS uses. Noem told lawmakers that immigration officers have used administrative warrants, which are not signed by a judge, 400,000 times but only 28 times to enter a home.
But GOP lawmakers have pushed back on other demands, such as prohibiting agents from wearing masks to conceal their identities. Republicans say doing so would make it easier for people to dox federal officers.
And generally, Republicans oppose the ongoing shutdown of the agency. Noem said about 100,000 employees are working without pay.
Noem's leadership questioned
Although there has been some bipartisan scrutiny of Noem's leadership at the hearing, lawmakers largely stuck to party lines. Democrats were critical of Noem's spending, arrest tactics and deportation targets. Republicans broadly defended the administration's goal of mass deportations.
Still, GOP members of the committee had a range of questions including on that domestic terrorism label and advertisements encouraging immigrants to self-deport – an ad campaign worked on by the . A firm run by the husband of the former chief DHS spokesperson, according to reporting by Propublica.
"They were effective in your name recognition. To me it puts the president in a terribly awkward spot," Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana said.
In the wake of the shootings in Minnesota, some Republican senators called for Noem's resignation, including Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who is not running for reelection but sits on the Senate Judiciary committee, and Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.
Other Republicans denounced Noem's labeling of Pretti as a "domestic terrorist" in the immediate aftermath of the shooting.
Since then, an initial report from the oversight arm of CBP contradicted the narrative of Pretti's death. And last month, the heads of ICE, CBP and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, another agency within DHS, also testified before the House and Senate and declined to back Noem's narrative about Pretti's death.
Under Noem's leadership, DHS has been at the epicenter of the Trump administration's ambitious effort to detain and deport one million people living in the U.S. without legal status each year. During Trump's first year in office, the agency claims it deported more than 675,000 people.
According to an analysis by the Deportation Data Project, a coalition of academics and lawyers who track and publish immigration enforcement data, the number of deportations from the interior of the country, away from the border, increased nearly fivefold during the first nine months of Trump's second term. The administration roughly tripled the number of detention beds for people arrested within the country, the analysis also found.
Noem has also overseen a hiring surge to bring on thousands of new ICE officers, which has led some immigrant advocates to question the quality of training those officers are receiving. She also allowed CBP, an agency with a history of excessive force, to take on a greater role enforcing the president's immigration agenda throughout the interior of the country.
To some extent, DHS' immigration agenda has been curbed by federal courts, including the Supreme Court. Federal district judges have blocked the agency from using wartime powers to expedite deportations, for instance, and ordered some deportees returned to the U.S.
Noem, the former governor of South Dakota, sailed through her Senate confirmation last year as a vocal supporter of Trump's immigration agenda. But her tenure has also faced questions about how she's handled other agency responsibilities, including her management of national disaster relief and resources through FEMA.
Copyright 2026 NPR
