President Donald Trump walked away after giving a one-word answer to a question about whether Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem would be stepping down.
“No,” he simply replied, before ambling away from the reporter.
Trump also said he wants an “honorable and honest investigation” into Border Patrol agents’ killing of Veterans Affairs nurse Alex Pretti and refused to back up claims by Noem that the shooting was justified.
The comments came as Trump headed to Iowa hoping to recalibrate his message on affordability, as the fallout over his deportation strategy dominates headlines.
Amid ongoing national outrage over Pretti’s death, Trump has now sent border czar Tom Homan to Minneapolis to help local authorities de-escalate tensions between federal immigration agents and anti-ICE protesters.
The move effectively sidelined Noem, who met for nearly two hours with the president on Monday night to discuss the crisis, alongside her senior adviser and alleged lover Corey Lewandowski.
Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino—the notorious face of Trump’s deportation effort and the subject of Nazi cosplay memes due to his trademark green trench coat—had also been benched.
Speaking to reporters for the first time since he announced the personnel changes, Trump took a far more conciliatory tone to Noem and Bovino, who had sought to portray Pretti as a “domestic terrorist” intent on harming law enforcement.
That was despite videos and witnesses suggesting otherwise.
Asked if Pretti’s death was justified, Trump declined to jump to conclusions, saying a “big investigation” was now underway and “I’m going to be watching over it.”
“I want a very honorable and honest investigation. I have to see it myself,” he said, even declaring his love for Pretti’s family.
“I love everybody. I love all of our people. I love his family. And it’s a very sad situation.”
But as calls mount for Noem’s resignation or impeachment, Trump also insisted she was doing “a very good job,” noting that the southern border, for which her department has oversight, is “totally secure.”
“You forget we had a border that I inherited where millions of people were coming through. Now we have a border where no one is coming through. They come into our country only legally. So you have to remember those things,” Trump said.
“As soon as you accomplish something, it goes into history, and nobody ever wants to talk about it.”
Trump’s staffing shakeup nonetheless underscores the frustration within the White House that his signature election policy has now become a major source of outrage for millions of Americans as the midterm elections loom in November.
According to a new Politico poll, nearly half of all Americans—49 percent—say his mass deportation campaign is too aggressive, including 1 in 5 voters who backed the president in 2024.
Equally troubling for the president is that more than 1 in 3 voters from his own base say that while they support the goals of his mass deportation campaign, they disapprove of the way he is implementing it.
Anger escalated over the weekend, when Pretti, 37, was shot by federal agents after he filmed an immigration operation on his phone.
“This is a violent riot when you have someone showing up with weapons and are using them to assault law enforcement officers,” Noem said on Saturday in the aftermath of the shooting.
Videos showed that Pretti appeared to have been disarmed of his legally owned handgun before being shot dead.
The shooting came about two weeks after an ICE agent shot and killed another American citizen, mother-of three Renee Good.
According to a new report, experienced federal immigration agents in Minneapolis are privately raging about Pretti’s death and want out of the mission.
“This is a no-win situation for agents on the ground or immigration enforcement overall,” one Border Patrol agent wrote in a private chat obtained by journalist Ken Klippenstein and published on his Substack.
“I think it’s time to pull out of Minnesota, that battle is lost,” they added.
