GOP senators railed against a host of Alejandro Mayorkas’ failures in Friday’s confirmation hearing for Kristi Noem, President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The hearing at times seemed like a Republican therapy session for lawmakers who needed to express their disgust with current DHS Secretary Mayorkas, whom Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno of Ohio described as “the worst cabinet member ever in the history of the United States of America.”
Senator Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, recounted how Mayorkas established the Disinformation Governance Board “using taxpayer resources to police speech on the internet and elsewhere, to tag American citizens’ viewpoints as either legitimate or not legitimate, and used the power of the state to censor them.”
“This has got to be the darkest chapter, I think, in DHS’s short history,” Hawley said. “[Mayorkas] eventually withdrew the board under intense criticism but has never fully repudiated it and never promised not to do it again.”
The theme of the hearing was that DHS has moved away from its mission. Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, a Republican, summarized conservative criticism of the department in his opening statement:
Instead of focusing on critical threats like securing the southwest border, DHS has shifted its gaze inward, targeting law abiding Americans. DHS, under the Biden administration, has often used its vast powers to target Americans exercising their constitutional rights. It’s become an agency more focused on policing speech, monitoring social media, and labeling political dissent as domestic terrorism than addressing genuine security threats. While cartels traffic people and fentanyl across an unguarded border, DHS has spent its time and resources creating partisan disinformation boards spying on Americans through invasive surveillance technologies. The mission drift is dangerous.
DHS oversees some of the most problematic agencies and departments in the nation including, but not limited to Customs and Border Protection (CBP); Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE); the Secret Service; the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA); the Transportation Security Agency (TSA); and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
Democrats did not line up to defend Mayorkas or DHS in its current form. They were gentle with Noem, and seemed warm for reform, with their own complaints that DHS has not been transparent about providing documents Senate members requested from the Secret Service regarding the Trump assassination attempts or timely border crossing information.
Several Democrats wanted assurances from Noem that she would focus on more than deportations. They pointed to homegrown terrorism, mentioning the New Year’s Day truck attack on pedestrians in New Orleans. Several asked Noem if she intended to play politics in the distribution of FEMA disaster relief funds, giving funds only to Republican disaster victims. Noem said FEMA funds would not depend on party politics.
Noem also said she would send employees under the umbrella of DHS, including FEMA workers, back to the office.
“I’ve heard since being nominated for this position that many of the agencies within the department are not showing up. They’re not doing their jobs,” Noem said. “But even FEMA, who is responsible for disaster response — that they have the alternative, some of these employees, to not even respond to a disaster, which might explain the horrific results that we saw in North Carolina when they had such a terrible disaster that impacted families and communities, and FEMA failed them so miserably.”
Noem stated she would end the flying of illegal aliens into the country and stop the use of the CBP One cellphone app, which Mayorkas and the Biden administration used to facilitate their radical open borders policy. She also plans to improve communications between federal, state, and local agencies during disasters.
“The morale in DHS is very low,” Noem said. “I’m going to let people do their jobs. I’m going to remind them what their jobs are. Some of these Border Patrol agents haven’t been able to do their jobs for a very long time. They’ve been processing paperwork and facilitating an invasion, when they should be back securing our border, which is why they were recruited and wanted to serve there to begin with.”
Sen. Moreno challenged Democrats to confirm Noem.
“If this were a job interview in the private sector, and you had somebody like Alejandro Mayorkas in charge, and we had the opportunity to upgrade to [Noem], this would be the greatest upgrade in history of the United States of America,” Moreno said. “When Mayorkas was confirmed, every single Democrat voted to confirm him, and six Republicans joined … in that confirmation. …We should have 100 percent — 100 senators vote for your confirmation. This will be the litmus test, in my mind, as to whether we have a Democrat party that’s actually serious about doing bipartisan things like securing this country and protecting our citizens.”
Beth Brelje is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. She is an award-winning investigative journalist with decades of media experience.
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