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By Dan Gooding
Associate News Editor
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North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis criticized Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Tuesday, comparing her decision to kill her puppy 20 years ago to her actions leading DHS.
In a fiery speech during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Tillis, a Republican, told Noem he was disappointed in her leadership when it comes to immigration enforcement. He said he had read her book last week, in which she wrote about choosing to shoot a 14-month-old puppy because she was "untrainable" around 20 years ago.
"Then you have the audacity to go into a book and say it's a leadership lesson about tough choices," Tillis said, also questioning Noem's account of castrating a goat because it was poorly behaved. "My point is, those are bad decisions made in the heat of the moment, not unlike what happened up in Minneapolis.
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"We're an exceptional nation, and one of the reasons we're exceptional is we expect exceptional leadership, and you've demonstrated anything but that."
Tillis said Noem had spoken too soon during emergencies and had not apologized when needed, in particular around the rhetoric used following the fatal shootings of U.S. citizens Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti at the hands of federal agents in Minneapolis.
A longtime critic of the secretary, Tillis also said that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) should not be working to arrest quotas, arguing this was leading to real national security threats being missed.
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Why Is Thom Tillis Disappointed With Kristi Noem?
Tillis opened his time by recounting why he felt voters returned President Donald Trump to the White House: because of the border policies adopted during President Joe Biden's term. He said that millions of illegal immigrants had been allowed to enter the U.S. under Noem's predecessor, Alejandro Mayorkas, and this was also why he was critical of the current secretary's work.
"We're missing an opportunity," Tillis said, explaining that he felt Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) could not be everywhere at once and therefore should be more focused in their operations. "Why am I disappointed in Secretary Noem? Because we're not going after enough people who did this damage at the expense of running numbers that Stephen Miller wants out of the White House."
Tillis said numbers did not matter, quality did, calling DHS a "disaster" under Noem's leadership, pointing to the arrests of U.S. citizens and the deaths of Good and Pretti in Minneapolis in January.
"Why can't we just say we made a mistake?" Tillis asked Noem, echoing other questions from senators on the operation in the Twin Cities.
Noem repeatedly failed to answer if agents had made mistakes and whether her rhetoric around the shootings was wrong.
Tillis said officer-involved shootings had formulas that should be followed every time by federal agencies, but that the Trump administration was not following them. He also told Noem she had failed at leading FEMA, which falls under DHS, after what he viewed as a slow response to disasters in North Carolina.
Tillis finished his time by saying he would seek Noem's removal from her position if he did not receive sufficient answers to his questions. The senator ran out of his allotted time without an opportunity for Noem to respond.
Why Is Kristi Noem Testifying?
Noem appeared before the Senate committee amid the ongoing partial shutdown of the DHS because of a funding lapse as well as ongoing questions over her leadership of DHS following multiple controversies regarding immigration enforcement.
“The latest Democrat-led shutdown of DHS is reckless,” Noem told the hearing. “It’s unnecessary, and it undermines the American national security, and it harms the men and women who work at DHS and their families.”
While funding was discussed during the hearing, committee members opted to focus on Noem's leadership of immigration enforcement and the federal agents working on operations.
Noem sought to defend her record, arguing that DHS follows all court orders and is carrying out targeted operations—something that received pushback from the panel.
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Did Kristi Noem Kill Her Dog? What She Revealed in 'No Going Back'
In her book, "No Going Back: The Truth on What's Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward," published in 2024 when she was South Dakota governor, Noem revealed that she shot her dog Cricket after realizing it was "untrainable."
Noem shot the dog after leading it to a gravel pit after it killed a family's chickens.
"Cricket was a wirehair pointer, about 14 months old," Noem wrote, adding that the dog, a female, had an "aggressive personality" and needed to be trained to be used for hunting pheasant. She wrote that she took Cricket on a pheasant hunt with older dogs to calm the animal and help it learn how to behave. But on the hunt, Cricket went "out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life."
Noem then used an electronic collar to attempt to bring her under control, she wrote, but that didn't work. Then on the way home, Cricket escaped Noem's truck and attacked the family's chickens, "grabb[ing] one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another." That made the chickens' owner cry and Noem financially renumerated them and helped them clean the mess the dog had made.
"At that moment," Noem wrote, "I realized I had to put her down. It was not a pleasant job, but it had to be done."
The story drew criticism during the presidential election campaign, as Noem was already a close ally of Trump. He then chose her as his Homeland Security secretary.
This is a breaking news story and will be updated.
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