Editorial: Kristi Noem is sent packing as homeland security secretary. We'll celebrate with most of Chicago

The Editorial Board, Chicago Tribune on Mar 9, 2026

Published in Op Eds

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Kristi Noem has been removed from her perch atop the Department of Homeland Security. Like the vast majority of Chicagoans, we will shed no tears.

As secretary of homeland security, the former governor of South Dakota oversaw an immigration enforcement operation so poorly managed, and so brutalizing, that two American citizens were shot dead on the streets of Minneapolis in broad daylight, for the world to see.

Whatever your views on the actions of protesters, all reasonable people should agree that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents killing Americans was an unacceptable outcome. And, to reiterate, it happened at least twice.

Before dispatching thousands of poorly trained, masked federal agents to the Twin Cities, Noem had flooded the Chicago area with a somewhat smaller but still hefty, and just as poorly trained, force of agents who bravely staked out Home Depot parking lots to hunt down migrants looking for work, captured and detained tamale vendors.

We don’t doubt a tiny fraction of their quarry was worth deporting in this manner, but that was overwhelmed by the vast number of people who clearly posed no immediate threat. As a city, we also witnessed far too many performative scenes intended primarily to intimidate city neighborhoods and suburbs long home to immigrants. Unforgivably, those here legally were made to feel just as unsafe.

In America, for God’s sake.

Halloween celebrations for a host of Chicago-area kids inexcusably either were filled with fear or were disrupted by the enforcement actions overseen by Noem.

Agents stormed into a Chicago day care center in November to chase down a teacher, who ran into her place of work as she was being hunted, thereby terrorizing the preschoolers who were there.

Chicagoans responded to the incursions by blowing whistles to alert their neighbors when Border Patrol agents were about and by protesting (mostly peacefully) on city and suburban streets as well as at the federal immigration detention in Broadview. These protests didn’t take place only in hard-bitten Chicago. Residents in suburbs from Wilmette and Evanston to Mount Prospect and Arlington Heights rose up to confront agents in their communities, in accordance with our Constitution’s right to peaceful protest.

Chicago didn’t make the national news or become the stuff of Bruce Springsteen songs the way Minneapolis’ travails did, but we too saw too many injuries stemming from DHS’ weekslong “operation” here — although that is a term that affords Noem’s ragtag band too much dignity.

Agents shot to death 38-year-old Silverio Villegas-González in Franklin Park in September and justified their actions by saying he’d tried to run them over in his car. We certainly heard a similar explanation for why Renee Good was shot to death in her car in Minneapolis, but in that case, there was video that raised major questions, to say the least, about just how threatened the agent who killed her truly was. We don’t have similar video for the shooting of Villegas-González. If we did, you might be reading his name nearly as often as you do that of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, also shot to death by agents in Minneapolis.

In all of the chaos her troops sowed throughout Chicagoland, Noem barely engaged with the local media to explain the need for such heavy-handed tactics or to address outrageous actions such as the heavily armed agents who burst into the day care center. We wanted to hear what she had to say and tried hard to get her to talk to us but we failed in our quest.

It is a shame that Noem’s pitiful performance as homeland security secretary reportedly wasn’t the primary reason for her dismissal, although it surely should have helped push her out the door. Instead, President Donald Trump apparently removed her after she testified before Congress that he had approved the spending of more than $200 million on ubiquitous television ads featuring Noem in very glamorous getups talking tough to those in the country without legal authorization.

Trump said afterward he’d never done any such thing, effectively accusing her of lying. Terrorizing American cities isn’t enough to get you fired as secretary of DHS, apparently, but making the president look bad most definitely will do the trick in this administration.

Good riddance to Noem. Trump plans to nominate Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin as her replacement. We’ll hope for better. In this arena at least, the Trump administration can hardly do worse.

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