President Donald Trump floated a theory as to why Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem has come under so much fire the past week, and it’s not because of her department’s disastrous immigration crackdown in Minneapolis.
“The Radical Left Lunatics, Insurrectionists, Agitators, and Thugs, are going after Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, because she is a woman, and has done a really GREAT JOB!” he wrote.
He went on to praise Noem’s handling of the U.S.-Mexico border before calling Minneapolis’ massive anti-ICE protests a “SCAM” meant to “obfuscate” an ongoing fraud scandal in Minnesota.
Minneapolis has erupted in protest over federal immigration officers killing two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, as well as the general mood of terror that ICE’s aggressive tactics have cast over parts of the city and its suburbs.
Noem drew especially sharp condemnation for her statements following the death of Pretti, who was fatally shot by Border Patrol officers. Nearly immediately after the shooting, Noem said that Pretti was planning to “inflict maximum damage” on law enforcement and had been “brandishing a gun”— a claim that flew in the face of multiple eyewitness videos of the incident.
Norm defended her initial reaction to the killing in a Fox News interview Thursday, saying that “we were using the best information we had at the time.”