Kristi Noem reportedly eyes Senate exit from DHS as internal turmoil and polling fears mount

Kristi Noem has developed a secret plan to leave the Trump administration and mount a Senate campaign in South Dakota, according to reports from the Atlantic and the Daily Mail. The move, if executed, would make her the first cabinet secretary to exit the Trump administration since the start of his second term.

The plot reportedly began to take shape following the fatal shooting of 37-year-old ICU nurse Alex Pretti by an immigration agent in Minneapolis. The fallout from that incident, combined with sliding poll numbers, appears to have convinced Noem that her future lies elsewhere.

What followed Pretti's death tells you everything about how Noem has run the Department of Homeland Security.

The Minneapolis Shooting and Its Aftermath

Noem and top White House officials labeled Pretti a "domestic terrorist" moments after his death began to circulate online. That accusation collapsed almost immediately. Footage showed agents disarming him before he was shot. The FBI now has an active investigation into whether agents violated his civil rights.

The rush to label a dead man a terrorist before the facts were in was not just reckless. It was the kind of institutional malpractice that erodes public trust in legitimate enforcement operations. Conservatives who support strong immigration enforcement should be the first to demand that it be conducted competently and honestly. Sloppy leadership poisons the well for the entire agenda, as Daily Mail reports.

After the shooting, President Trump sidelined Noem by placing Tom Homan, his border czar, in charge of the immigration crackdown in Minneapolis. That is not a vote of confidence.

Polling, Lewandowski, and the Senate Gambit

Soon after Pretti's death, public polling revealed that support for Trump's immigration enforcement had dropped. Around the same time, Noem and her rumored lover Corey Lewandowski commissioned a poll to evaluate her approval rating with the public, according to the Daily Mail. Voters in South Dakota were also asked whom they would vote for in a matchup between Noem and the state's Republican Sen. Mike Rounds, according to the Atlantic.

The filing deadline is next month. The timeline is not subtle.

A national Republican strategist offered a blunt assessment of Noem's potential opponent:

"Mike Rounds is so unpopular amongst Republican primary voters, he'd lose to a dead dog."

Other GOP operatives pushed back, noting that Rounds has maintained electoral leadership in the state for over a decade by serving two terms as governor before being elected to the Senate. Whether Noem could actually beat him is an open question. That she is even running the numbers while serving as a cabinet secretary is the more revealing detail.

A Department in Disarray

Noem's tenure at DHS has produced a department that, by multiple accounts, is at war with itself. Approximately 80 percent of career leadership at ICE has been fired or demoted by Noem. She and Lewandowski have openly been firing and demoting officials not viewed as loyal to her for the past year.

Think about that number. Eighty percent of career leadership, gone. Not reassigned. Not restructured as part of a coherent reform plan. Fired or demoted in what widespread reports describe as a culture of fear within the department.

The department has splintered into two camps. On one side, Noem and Lewandowski. On the other, a bloc of career law enforcement officials aligned with Homan, whose decades-long career in immigration enforcement has earned him credibility among the professionals who actually execute operations on the ground.

There is a meaningful difference between cleaning house to install competent leadership and conducting a loyalty purge that hollows out institutional capacity. The former is good governance. The latter is how you end up with agents shooting a nurse in Minneapolis and a cabinet secretary scrambling to check her poll numbers before the body is cold.

What This Means for Immigration Enforcement

The conservative case for strict immigration enforcement has always rested on the rule of law. That case is strongest when the people executing it are credible, professional, and accountable. It is weakest when it is led by officials more interested in self-preservation than in results.

Noem previously served two terms as South Dakota's governor. She arrived at DHS with significant political capital. What she did with it, by the accounts now emerging, was build a fiefdom rather than a functioning department. The allegations of corruption, the personnel purges, the rushed public statements that crumbled under scrutiny: none of this advances the mission.

President Trump's decision to hand Minneapolis operations to Homan suggests the White House sees the same problem. Homan has the enforcement credentials and the trust of the rank-and-file that Noem has spent a year systematically destroying.

If Noem does leave for a Senate run, the question is not whether DHS can survive her departure. It is whether her departure comes soon enough to repair the damage before it compounds further. The mission is too important to be run by someone already looking for the exit.