Donald Trump has reportedly chosen South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem to serve as Secretary of Homeland Security in his second administration, according to CNN.
Noem has been tapped to lead the agency as two other immigration hardliners, Tom Homan and Stephen Miller, were also picked for ‘border czar’ and White House deputy chief of staff respectively.
DHS is a sprawling agency that oversees Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the US Secret Service.
Noem was reportedly on Trump’s shortlist for vice president. However, she lost her spot after revealing in her book that she shot her 14-month-old family dog named Cricket, for ruining a pheasant hunt and attacked a local family’s chickens.
“I hated that dog,” Noem writes, adding that Cricket was “untrainable”, “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with” and “less than worthless … as a hunting dog”.
Noem defended the move, saying she was being “responsible” and following the law. But she faced bipartisan criticism at the time from Fox News pundits and Hillary Clinton.
Noem also described shooting and killing a “nasty and mean” male goat that smelled “disgusting, musky and rancid” and liked to chase her children.
She also faced backlash over a blatantly false claim in her book that she met North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un while she was serving as a back-bencher in Congress.
