Kristi Noem Roasted for Using Sketchy Crime Numbers to Fear-Monger

South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of homeland security, got some heat for rattling off dubious statistics during her Senate confirmation hearing Friday. 

Michigan Senator Gary Peters noted that the hearing had considered a “fair amount of political theater,” and reminded those listening that the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee endeavored to be a “fact-based committee.”

“We’ve heard a lot of numbers being thrown around here. And I don’t have time to go through and challenge those numbers; some of them we don’t even know where they came from,” Peters said. “I don’t think that’s helpful to the very important mission of confirm that you’re gonna be dealing with.

“So, I hope that in the future that we’re actually dealing with facts. You’ve mentioned many times that you want to deal with facts, and real data. And again, we’ve heard a lot here that’s not real data. And we should not operate that way,” Peters said.

Peters’s comment, though not directed at any particular person, seemed to be a way to chastise those present for providing sourceless numbers about immigration—including Noem.  

“President Trump was elected with a clear mandate,” Noem said in her opening statement. “He needs to achieve this mission because two-thirds of Americans support his immigration and border policies, including the majority of Hispanic Americans.”

But a postelection survey by the Public Religion Research Institute found that just 26 percent of Americans agreed that the U.S. military should put undocumented immigrants into internment camps until they can be deported, which is exactly Trump’s plan. Not even two-thirds of Republicans support such an extreme plot, only 46 percent. Not exactly a mandate. 

Noem also rattled off a slate of numbers about immigration that didn’t seem totally sound, either. 

“Over 13,000 murderers loose in this country that have come over that border. We have had almost 16,000 rapists and sexual assault perpetrators that are loose in this country right now. Four hundred eighty-five thousand–plus people have criminal convictions that are here in this country,” she insisted

Noem appears to have gotten her numbers from DHS’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but she is misstating some of the facts. In July, ICE reported that there were 13,000 immigrants who have been convicted of homicide, either in their home country or in the U.S., and 16,000 who are convicted of sexual assault but who were not currently in ICE detention. While Noem suggested that these individuals are “loose,” she failed to provide the essential caveat that they could already be in jail for their crimes or not “prioritized” for detention by ICE itself.

The ICE report also stated that there were 425,431 undocumented immigrants outside of ICE detention who were convicted criminals, and an additional 222,141 with pending criminal charges—not “485,000-plus.”

Much of Noem’s hearing revolved around so-called “migrant crime,” as she insisted that undocumented immigrants had been allowed to get away with rape and murder under the Biden administration—something that is simply not true. 

Ohio Lieutenant Governor Jon Husted will take Vice President-elect JD Vance’s place in the Senate, Governor Mike DeWine announced Friday, in an apparent snub to Donald Trump.

“This is an unusual situation, and it’s frankly a very heavy responsibility,” DeWine, a two-term former senator himself, told reporters at the Ohio Statehouse in Columbus. “I think I have a pretty good idea of what it takes to succeed in the United States Senate and what it takes to represent your state.”

“The person that is best suited to serve as the United States senator is a person who has served next to me for the last six years,” DeWine said. “I know his knowledge of Ohio, I know his heart, I know his skills. And all of that tells me that he is the right person for this job.

“John Husted will be right at home in the United States Senate.”

DeWine laid out his criteria for selecting Husted, clarifying that he “wanted someone who knew Ohio,” emphasizing the state’s agricultural and cultural diversity, and who could also understand the fundamental interplay between the federal government and the state government.

“There is so much interaction, and so much of we—of what I do, is impacted not just by the laws of Congress but, frankly, by the different rules and regulations put forward by the president and the executive branch,” DeWine continued.

“Third, I wanted someone who would go to the United States Senate and work. I wanted a workhorse,” DeWine added, stressing the state of the country’s military and national security.

“Finally, the next person who goes to the U.S. Senate, I know, would have to run and run and run,” the governor said, noting that the Ohio senatorial replacement would need to be able to win over the state’s denizens by the 2026 election.

Husted has been allied with DeWine since they ran together to lead Ohio in 2018. He also served as Ohio’s secretary of state and was in the running to replace DeWine in 2026, when the term-limited governor’s career atop Ohio politics is slated to end.

“I look forward to working with President Trump and JD Vance to make America great again,” Husted told reporters following his appointment. “I have dedicated most of my professional life to serving the state of Ohio, and stepping away as lieutenant governor is not easy.”

In the wake of the announcement, Ohio Democrats highlighted Husted’s controversial background in the state’s politics, including avoiding depositions and soliciting donations from FirstEnergy as the energy company sought to secure a bailout for its nuclear power plants—something that the Ohio Capital Journal described as the “largest corruption scheme in state history.”

“While Governor DeWine may have handed Husted a literal get out of jail free card, Ohioans won’t tolerate a career politician with a penchant for corruption and scandal,” Ohio Democratic Party Chair Elizabeth Walters said in a statement. “It’s already clear we can’t trust Husted. Over the next two years, Democrats will work tirelessly to hold Husted accountable and will be contesting this competitive seat in the midterm election.”

It’s the first time that Ohio has had to fill a Senate vacancy since 1974, when William B. Saxbe left the seat to serve as the U.S. attorney general.

Vance officially resigned from the post last week. Under Ohio law, DeWine was singularly tasked with appointing his replacement. Husted will operate as senator until 2026, when a special election will determine who will serve in the role until the term expires in 2029.

DeWine was tight-lipped throughout the months-long process to fill Vance’s vacancy, but other potential candidates included Ohio Treasurer Robert Sprague, former state Senator Matt Dolan, Ohio Secretary of State Frank Larose, Columbus-area Congressman Mike Carey, and former Ohio Republican Party Chair Jane Timken.

Trump threw a Molotov into the mix just days before Husted’s appointment, personally imploring Vivek Ramaswamy to take the seat if it were offered to him. Ramaswamy publicly backed out of the race to replace Vance in November after Trump announced him as a potential co-chair for the not-yet-real Department of Government Efficiency alongside world’s richest man, Elon Musk. But Ramaswamy seemingly changed his mind over the last week, meeting with DeWine to discuss the appointment. DeWine also visited Mar-a-Lago last week.

Moments before DeWine’s announcement, an anonymous source close to Ramaswamy told Reuters that the biotech executive is planning to launch a run to become Ohio’s governor.

This story has been updated.

South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem was asked during her hearing Friday whether she was committed to stopping all threats to homeland security—not just the ones that push Donald Trump’s agenda on immigration.

Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin, who previously served as a Middle East analyst for the CIA, asked Noem if she intended to be “clear and honest about facts” related to terrorist threats in the United States.

“So, it’s just important to me that I know particularly since you do have one of the intelligence agencies within the Department of Homeland Security, that you’re gonna call a spade a spade,” Slotkin said. “The most recent acts of domestic terrorism in New Orleans—horrible incident—in Nevada, had nothing to do with migrants. Correct?”

“Correct,” Noem replied.

“They were homegrown American citizens; one of them was actually in a very elite military unit. I mean, it’s horrible. It’s one of the hardest things to catch. The sort of lone wolf, radicalized American citizen,” Slotkin continued. It’s worth noting that the incident in Nevada, in which a man detonated fireworks inside a Tesla Cybertruck outside the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas, was investigated as a possible terrorist attack but ultimately ruled a suicide by local officials.

“But I want to protect ourselves, our most recent examples of domestic terrorism were not what we have spent the majority talking about today: crime from a migrant,” Slotkin said. She noted that she didn’t dispute that some crimes are committed by immigrants—in fact, Slotkin was one of the more than two dozen Democrats who voted in support of the Laken Riley Act, which would, among other things, allow the government to detain undocumented immigrants accused of committing nonviolent crimes.

During the hearing, several Republican lawmakers had already waxed poetic on their xenophobic views about immigrants and fretted over so-called “migrant crime,” of which Trump had touted gruesome cases on the campaign trail in an attempt to fearmonger about Joe Biden’s immigration and border policies. In reality, undocumented immigrants are statistically less likely to commit a violent crime—but “migrant crime” still manages to take up lots of airtime and column inches, as well as generate clicks because it evidently also wins elections.

“I just want to know, and I want to hear from you, as an intelligence officer, that you’re going to speak about real threats and not blow something up, politicize something, make something more exciting because maybe that’s what the president wants to hear,” Slotkin said. “But your mission to protect and defend the Constitution means calling honestly what the threats are to the country. Can you just give me a ‘yes or no,’ please?”

“Yes, Senator,” Noem replied, before proceeding to answer about half the question. “I will be as transparent and factual every day with you and the American people as possible, based on the information that I have.”

“I don’t know if the investigations are closed in New Orleans and in Nevada, but what we know so far and needs to be related to the American people needs to be the truth and facts,” Noem said, as if to leave the door open to potential immigrant connections in those incidents—a wild theory that some Republicans, including Trump’s incoming “border czar” Tom Homan, pushed in the weeks since.

Whether she intended to focus on threats from American citizens with the same politicized fervor with which her Republican colleagues have addressed the crimes of undocumented immigrants remains to be seen.

More details are emerging about Donald Trump Jr.’s trip to Greenland, and it’s looking a lot worse than previously thought.

The Guardian reports that when Trump Jr. visited the upscale Hotel Hans Egede for lunch, the “fans” wearing MAGA hats with him were actually homeless people picked up off the street who were promised a free lunch and didn’t find out who Trump was until later.

Trump Jr. “had just met them in the street and invited them for lunch, or his staff did. But I don’t think they knew who they were inviting,” said the hotel’s chief executive, Jørgen Bay-Kastrup.

“That of course was a little bit strange to us because we saw guests that we have never seen in our hotel before—and will probably never see again because it’s out of their economical means,” Bay-Kastrup added. “They were just, ‘Hey, somebody invited us for lunch, let’s go and join him.’ I think they found out later who it was.”

One student who joined the photo op at the hotel, Malik Dollerup-Scheibel, told The Wall Street Journal the experience was “very weird.” He now regrets taking part, saying he only wanted free beer and to meet a famous American. He believes Trump’s visit appeared to be a stunt to convince MAGA supporters that Greenland’s people want the U.S. to take over the island.

“This is probably the most shameful thing I own,” Dollerup-Scheibel said, holding up the MAGA hat he was given. He didn’t expect to have his face circulating on social media.

Trump’s visit led to some American YouTubers showing up on the island handing out $100 bills and “Make Greenland Great Again” hats. While some young people gleefully exchanged the money for Danish kroner and headed for bars, others were less enthused. One man ripped up a bill and stomped on the red baseball cap, according to The Wall Street Journal. It appears the island’s residents aren’t that keen on President-elect Trump or his threats to seize their homeland.

President Joe Biden has proclaimed that the Equal Rights Amendment is now the “law of the land”—with just days left in office.

“We, as a nation, must affirm and protect women’s full equality once and for all,”  the president wrote in a statement released Friday morning. “In keeping with my oath and duty to Constitution and country, I affirm what I believe and what three-fourths of the states have ratified: the 28th Amendment is the law of the land, guaranteeing all Americans equal rights and protections under the law regardless of their sex.”

The ERA was introduced by suffragists in the 1920s and passed by Congress in 1972. But it wasn’t fully ratified, thanks to the activism of prominent anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly, and has remained in legislative limbo ever since. At least 38 states must ratify a proposed constitutional amendment, and only 35 have ratified the ERA, with the most recent being Virginia in 2020.

Biden’s late-term announcement will likely do very little to actually advance the ERA’s chances of becoming a constitutional amendment. That lies in the hands of the national archivist and Congress. The national archivist, who publishes amendments, has already stated that she could not add the ERA without approval from Congress or the courts, as the 1982 ratification deadline was missed. And a Republican-controlled Congress won’t be so kind as to give Biden a win like this on his way out. 

It’s a disappointment for the reproductive rights activists who have been calling for the ERA to be ratified for some time, especially since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. 

While Biden’s statement is positive, the timing of such a critical piece of legislation—three days before Trump is inaugurated—leaves many asking where this energy was for the four years Biden was in office. 

The incoming forty-seventh president doesn’t seem to believe he needs to abide by the law when it comes to following through on banning TikTok.

Moments after the Supreme Court upheld Congress’s ban Friday on the popular video-sharing app, Trump claimed he would be making a “decision” regarding its future in the American market, potentially sidestepping two branches of the U.S. government.

“It ultimately goes up to me, so you’re going to see what I’m going to do,” Trump told CNN’s Pamela Brown. “Congress has given me the decision, so I’ll be making the decision.”

Trump did not provide more details on what exactly that would look like.

On Thursday, U.S. officials revealed that President Joe Biden would not enforce the ban through the end of his presidency, handing the responsibility of interpreting the law to Trump.

Experts have said the app will not disappear from users’ phones, though it will be restricted from the app store, and new updates will no longer be available—eventually rendering the app unusable, reported the Associated Press.

Trump claimed he spoke on the phone with Chinese President Xi Jinping, in part discussing the future of TikTok, minutes before the Supreme Court released its opinion.

“I just spoke to Chairman Xi Jinping of China,” Trump posted on Truth Social Friday morning. “The call was a very good one for both China and the U.S.A. It is my expectation that we will solve many problems together, and starting immediately. We discussed balancing Trade, Fentanyl, TikTok, and many other subjects. President Xi and I will do everything possible to make the World more peaceful and safe!”

Trump has pledged to save the platform, though it’s unclear how his team intends to do so. Once inaugurated, Trump could issue a 90-day pause on the ban so long as a sale is in progress, per the terms of the law. But that could be difficult, as Chinese law restricts the sale of TikTok’s proprietary algorithm, according to Bytedance’s attorneys. And Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar—who represented the Biden administration in the case—told the nation’s highest court last week that even the 90-day respite isn’t a guarantee.

As the Supreme Court unanimously voted to uphold the government’s impending ban on TikTok, Justice Neil Gorsuch made an interesting observation in his concurring opinion.

“Whether this law will succeed in achieving its ends, I do not know. A determined foreign adversary may just seek to replace one lost surveillance application with another. As time passes and threats evolve, less dramatic and more effective solutions may emerge. Even what might happen next to TikTok remains unclear,” Gorsuch wrote, but he then added a caveat.

“But the question we face today is not the law’s wisdom, only its constitutionality. Given just a handful of days after oral argument to issue an opinion, I cannot profess the kind of certainty I would like to have about the arguments and record before us. All I can say is that, at this time and under these constraints, the problem appears real and the response to it not unconstitutional,” Gorsuch continued.

Gorsuch, a conservative appointed to the court by Donald Trump in 2017, cast doubt on how much the ban may be able to achieve, national security concerns or not. Even some Democratic lawmakers who voted for the ban seem to be trying to backtrack in the final days before the deadline takes effect, a confusing about-face.

Meanwhile, while the right had previously pushed for banning TikTok, Trump now opposes it, likely because the app altered its algorithm to make his content perform better and because one of his wealthy allies, Jeff Yass, has a large stake in its parent company. However, there’s another major reason that politicians on the right and left wanted to ban the app: the proliferation of pro-Palestine content.

Biden, with just days left in office, has said it will be up to Trump to decide how to enforce the ban. It’s anyone’s guess what he’ll decide to do, although he’s never had a high opinion of anything supporting the Palestinians.

South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem struggled to commit to giving disaster relief to all Americans during her confirmation hearing Friday, because it wasn’t exactly what Donald Trump had said.

Senator Richard Blumenthal pressed Noem on Trump’s recent statements threatening to withhold disaster relief from California as it suffers from devastating wildfires in Los Angeles County.

“I am really disappointed with some of the statements that President-elect Trump has made,” Blumenthal said. He cited the president-elect’s own words when he claimed that if California Governor Gavin Newsom failed to reinstate Trump-era policies in his state, “we won’t give him money to put out all his fires, and we don’t give him the money to put out his fires. He’s got problems.”

“The spectre is there of potential discrimination based on politics,” Blumenthal explained. “Withholding money from California or other states. It’s not an unfounded fear. In the last administration there were public reports about President Trump withholding money from the state of Washington because of his disagreements with Governor Inslee.”

Blumenthal said he was also concerned about his own Democratic-led state, Connecticut, which had suffered from intense floods, noting that “these natural disasters are going to become more frequent.

“I assume you will agree with me that withholding disaster relief, by President Trump or any other chief executive of the United States, is a violation of his duty, and of law?” Blumenthal asked, testing to see if Noem was willing to speak against Trump.

She was not.

“Well Senator, leadership has consequences, and looking at the tragedy that’s happening in California is—” Noem started.

“I want to ask you, uh ‘yes or no,’ with all due respect. It’s an easy—” Blumenthal interjected.

“What’s happening in California is the ramification of many decisions over many years,” Noem continued, though it is still unclear what amount of the destruction was the result of alleged government and resource mismanagement. “But under my leadership at the Department of Homeland Security, there will be no political bias to how disaster relief is delivered to the American people.”

Blumenthal then asked whether Noem would stand up to Trump if he decided he didn’t want to allocate money because he didn’t like the governor or the politics of that state, such as Connecticut.

“Senator, in three days President Trump will take an oath to uphold the Constitution and the rule of law in this country, and I’ll be glad to have him back,” Noem said. “I don’t speak to hypotheticals, which is what you’re asking me to do. But what I will tell you is as secretary, I will do the same, I will deliver the programs as the laws dictate—”

“Well, it’s more than a hypothetical, with all due respect,” Blumenthal said, before apologizing for interrupting her.

“It’s more than a hypothetical. It’s based on experience with President Trump withholding money from Washington state and elsewhere. I need to know from you, will you stand up to the president and say no?” Blumenthal pressed, asking about the fate of the hundred billion dollars that had been appropriated for disaster relief during the last session of Congress. “Would you say no to the president if he withholds that money?”

“Sir, I don’t know about the scenarios that you’re referencing with President Trump, but I will tell you is that if given the chance to be secretary of homeland security that I will deliver the programs according to the law and that it will be done with no political bias,” Noem said.

“So you pledge to allocate and distribute that hundred billion dollars?” Blumenthal asked.

“According to how the program is written with no political bias,” Noem confirmed. “Every American deserves to be there and have disaster relief the same as their neighbors.”

Blumenthal confirmed that this was “basically following the law.”

President Joe Biden shared a tidbit of one of his conversations with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu regarding the war on Palestine, though the revelation didn’t leave either country in a particularly good light.

In his final interview in the Oval Office Thursday night, Biden recalled one of Netanyahu’s retorts for refusing to end his country’s war on Palestine. He claimed that the Israeli leader told him in the early days of the conflict that the United States shouldn’t be policing other nations’ warfare strategies in light of the country’s long trail of devastation.

“When I went to Israel immediately after the attack led by Hamas, eight days later or whatever it was, I told him that we were going to help,” Biden told MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell. “And I said, ‘But Bibi, you can’t be carpet bombing these communities.’ And he said to me, ‘Well you did it. You carpet bombed Berlin. You dropped a nuclear weapon. You killed thousands of innocent people because you had to in order to win a war.’”

“I said, ‘But that’s why we came up with the [United Nations],’” Biden continued with a smirk. “New deals by which—how what we do relative to civilians and military.”

“So he was comparing twenty-first-century war tactics, battle tactics, with World War II?” asked O’Donnell.

“Well, what he was really doing was going after me for saying, ‘You can’t indiscriminately bomb civilian areas. Even if the bad guys are there. Even if the bad guys are there, you can’t take out two, 10, 1,500 innocent people in order to get one bad guy,” Biden replied.

“And he made the legitimate argument, his perspective—‘Look, these are the guys that killed my people. These are the guys that are all over in these tunnels. Nobody has any idea of the miles of tunnels that are down there. The only way to get to them is to take out the places under which they got to the tunnels.’”

Biden then likened Israel’s ensuing assault on Palestine to America’s “war on terror” after the 9/11 terrorist attack.

Biden’s response is a particularly damning indictment of how his administration handled ceasefire negotiations. It makes it clear that Biden knew early on that Netanyahu intended to indiscriminately target Gaza—and did little to stop him.

Eric Adams is in Mar-a-Lago today—and perhaps one step closer to that Trump pardon he’s been not-so-subtly angling for since November. 

In the midst of a reelection campaign and his own federal indictment, the New York City mayor announced, with no advance warning, that he’d be heading to Trump’s Florida property to talk about “New Yorkers’ priorities.” The mayor asked for the meeting himself, according to The New York Times. Adams is not the first Democrat to meet with the president-elect at his Florida estate, with Representative John Fetterman visiting him just last week. 

“Mayor Adams has made quite clear his willingness to work with President-elect Trump and his incoming administration on behalf of New Yorkers—and that partnership with the federal government is critical to New York City’s success,” said Adams’s spokesman Fabian Levy.”  

But anyone who’s been watching Adams can guess that some of this meeting—if not all of it—will be about a potential pardon. Adams, who is indicted on five federal corruption charges, compared himself to Hunter Biden in December, suggesting that he too was simply the target of a polarized Justice Department and worthy of a pardon. He also met with Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, to discuss how he could help the Trump administration deport millions of people. This meeting at Mar-a-Lago is just another step toward saving himself from prison. 

Adams’s mayoral competitors have been highly critical of his surprise trip.

“No one believes that Eric Adams sneaked off to Mar-a-Lago to advocate for the needs of any New Yorkers other than his own,” mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani posted on X. “The Mayor faces a federal trial on corruption charges in three short months and wants to appeal to the one person who can make it all go away. I fear he will sell out our city to secure that outcome.” 

“Eric Adams should state immediately that he will not seek or accept a pardon from Donald Trump,” said city comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander. “New Yorkers deserve to know that their Mayor is putting their interests ahead of his own—and whether our tax dollars, or Turkish Airlines, will be financing his trip to Florida.”

Trump has yet to comment on the meeting.