Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is expected to testify before members of the Senate on Tuesday amid a pause in funding to her agency and increased scrutiny of her leadership.
The Department of Homeland Security has been shut down for nearly a month after lawmakers failed to negotiate a budget deal to fund the agency and agree on changes to how immigration officers operate.
Noem is expected to tell lawmakers on the Senate Judiciary Committee how the shutdown is affecting regular Americans, including making air travel more difficult as employees with the Transportation Security Administration work without pay.
Watch Noem testify at 9 a.m. ET Tuesday:
But the focus of the hearing is likely to be on how Noem has been pursuing President Trump's mass deportation efforts in his second term. DHS is the agency that oversees both Customs and Border Protection, or CBP, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.
Republicans called for the hearing just days after CBP officers shot and killed 37-year-old Alex Pretti in Minneapolis in January. Pretti was the second U.S. citizen killed by federal immigration officers in the city after Renee Macklin Good's death at the hands of an ICE officer earlier in the month.
Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said ahead of Noem's testimony that he looked forward to hearing how she would address that violence.
"Let me be clear, one death is too many. But officers should never be threatened or harmed while enforcing our laws. And there is a clear difference between the conduct protected by the First Amendment and unlawful obstruction," Grassley said in his prepared remarks. "From my perspective, I believe immigration enforcement and dignity aren't mutually exclusive."
Legal experts have told NPR that much of the activity the government says amounts to obstruction — like observing and filming immigration officers — is constitutionally protected.
Some Democratic senators lamented the five-week gap between Pretti's death and the hearing.
"With all of the violence and deaths involving DHS, the Secretary is apparently in no hurry to account for her mismanagement of this national crisis. And she expects us to rubber stamp her record-breaking budget in the meantime," Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois, the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement in late January.
Noem has faced bipartisan criticism over how her agency handled the immigration surge in Minnesota, where about 3,000 federal officers were deployed before a recent drawdown. The immigration operation has created an atmosphere of intense fear and chaos in the state.
Many immigrant families have sheltered in place for weeks, afraid to leave their homes while foreign-born U.S. citizens have been carrying their passports with them amid reports of widespread racial profiling by immigration officers. For weeks, immigration officers also deployed aggressive tactics against Minnesotans protesting and observing their actions.
Regarding the shutdown, Democrats have spelled out a list of 10 demands to change the behavior of immigration officers, but finding consensus has been tough. Some asks, such as requiring immigration officers to wear body cameras, have bipartisan support. But GOP lawmakers have pushed back on other demands, such as prohibiting agents from wearing masks to conceal their identities. Republicans say doing so would make it easier for people to dox federal officers.
Noem's leadership questioned
In the wake of the shootings in Minnesota, some Republican senators called for Noem's resignation, including Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who is not running for reelection but sits on the Senate Judiciary committee, and Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.
Other Republicans denounced Noem's labeling of Pretti as a "domestic terrorist" in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, before any investigation of the killing was underway. Noem used similar language about Macklin Good's death.
Since then, an initial report from the oversight arm of CBP contradicted the narrative of Pretti's death. And last month, the heads of ICE, CBP and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, another agency within DHS, also testified before the House and Senate and declined to back Noem's narrative about Pretti's death.
Under Noem's leadership, DHS has been at the epicenter of the Trump administration's ambitious effort to detain and deport one million people living in the U.S. without legal status each year. During Trump's first year in office, the agency claims it deported more than 675,000 people.
According to an analysis by the Deportation Data Project, a coalition of academics and lawyers who track and publish immigration enforcement data, the number of deportations from the interior of the country, away from the border, increased nearly fivefold during the first nine months of Trump's second term. The administration roughly tripled the number of detention beds for people arrested within the country, the analysis also found.
Noem has also overseen a hiring surge to bring on thousands of new ICE officers, which has led some immigrant advocates to question the quality of training those officers are receiving. She also allowed CBP, an agency with a history of excessive force, to take on a greater role enforcing the president's immigration agenda throughout the interior of the country.
To some extent, DHS' immigration agenda has been curbed by federal courts, including the Supreme Court. Federal district judges have blocked the agency from using wartime powers to expedite deportations, for instance, and ordered some deportees returned to the U.S.
Noem, the former governor of South Dakota, sailed through her Senate confirmation last year as a vocal supporter of Trump's immigration agenda. But her tenure has also faced questions about how she's handled other agency responsibilities, including her management of national disaster relief and resources through FEMA.
Copyright 2026 NPR
