(The Center Square) – The U.S. Department of Homeland Security will crack down on domestic terrorism, the border, and cybersecurity attacks rather than waging war against election misinformation, secretary nominee Kristi Noem vowed.
During her Friday confirmation hearing before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, the Republican governor of South Dakota emphasized how the American people have lost trust in the DHS and other federal agencies meant to ensure national security, particularly those responsible for the border.
“My goal and my mission is to build trust. We will undertake a large job and a large duty that we have to fulfill, that the American people expect us to do, by securing our border,” Noem said. “Our nation is a nation with borders, or we’re no nation at all.”
Under the Biden administration, which replaced the Remain in Mexico policy with catch-and-release and expanded Temporary Protected Status, more than 14 million illegal border crossers have been reported, including roughly 2 million “gotaways,” The Center Square has reported.
Noem said the Biden administration has “abused and manipulated” the TPS program, and she promised to immediately reinstate Remain in Mexico if confirmed. She also pledged to shut down “on day one” the CBP One app, a program created by current DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and which Republicans argued was illegal. ABC News reported the program allowed nearly a million migrants to obtain U.S. work permits.
At the same time, Noem said, the U.S. must reform the legal immigration process to create a more fair and efficient system.
But another major issue Noem plans to tackle is cybersecurity infrastructure, including reigning in the recent anti-misinformation efforts by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which she says is a deviation from its core mission and an endangerment to Americans’ civil liberties.
“CISA has gotten far off-mission. They’re using their resources in ways that were never intended,” she said. “The misinformation and disinformation that they have stuck their toe into and meddled with should be refocused back onto what their job is. And that is to support critical infrastructure.”
By making CISA “much more effective, smaller, [and] more nimble,” she added, the DHS can better bolster American defense against cybersecurity threats, particularly the alarming rise of cyberattacks by China.
Some Democratic lawmakers pressed her on the tendency of conservatives to immediately attribute homegrown terrorism to foreign nationals in the U.S. illegally, as happened when Fox News initially claimed the American citizen who committed the New Year’s attack in New Orleans was a migrant.
On that matter and on all others, Noem promised, she would work to “build transparency and make sure the facts are shared.”
Republican lawmakers, for their part, asked if she would open the books on the Secret Service and Trump assassination attempts.
“I will work with you to get the information so that you have the truth of really what happened there and the failures so they can be fixed,” she answered.
