NOEM ISN'T PULLING MILLER UNDER THE BUS -- SHE'S USING HIM AS A HUMAN SHIELD

The White House response to public outrage over events in Minnesota is being described in some quarters as a "circular firing squad." Some people don't believe Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem will keep her job for much longer, and they believe she's trying to take De Facto President Stephen Miller down with her.

Wow. It’s clear what is happening here, and it is juicy. Kristi Noem knows she’s being thrown under the bus for her slanderous lies about Alex Pretti…and now she’s trying to pull Stephen Miller under the tires with her. These people deserve each other. www.axios.com/2026/01/27/t...

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— TrumpsTaxes (@trumpstaxes.com) January 27, 2026 at 4:58 PM

So will multiple heads roll, or will only Border Patrol's Greg Bovino lose his job? Regrettably, it appears that the latter scenario is more likely.

The New York Times says that Noem seemed to be in President Trump's doghouse, but only for a short time:

Facing an intense and increasingly bipartisan fusillade of criticism over the killing of a protester in Minneapolis and how Ms. Noem and other officials sought to portray the victim as a “domestic terrorist,” Mr. Trump removed the official running the deportation campaign in Minnesota and replaced him with an aide reporting directly to him, effectively cutting Ms. Noem out of the chain of command....

But her time in Mr. Trump’s penalty box was measured in hours. By Monday night, she was in the Oval Office, meeting with Mr. Trump. By Tuesday the president was telling reporters that her job was safe and that the media should focus more on her role in shutting down illegal immigration into the country, not the chaotic scenes coming out of Minnesota in which agents who report to her have twice shot and killed American citizens protesting their presence.

The Axios story cited in the Bluesky post above (free to read here) does say this:

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is under fire for issuing misleading and incendiary information that claimed immigration agents killed an armed Minnesota protestor Saturday because he wanted to "massacre" them.

But that language was dictated to Noem and her department by the man most responsible for the controversial operation: Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff and top Trump adviser, four sources tell Axios....

"Everything I've done, I've done at the direction of the president and Stephen," Noem told a person who relayed her remarks to Axios.

And why would she say this? Because Miller is apparently untouchable:

The episode illustrates the sheer power of Miller, Trump's close and longest-serving political adviser whose dominion in the White House far exceeds his title.

His influence extends to de facto oversight of Noem, though she's a Cabinet secretary who technically outranks him.

... Miller ... remains one of the president's closest advisers, sources said.

"Stephen Miller is one of President Trump's most trusted and longest-serving aides. The president loves Stephen," White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Axios.

Miller, for his part, declared that the shooting of Alex Pretti -- which he'd previously celebrated -- happened because Customs and Border Protection agents "may not have been following ... protocol." So he's throwing Noem (who oversees CBP) under the bus. She, on the other hand, is using him as a human shield.

Which means, sadly, that neither one is likely to be unemployed anytime soon. The majority of Democrats in the House want to impeach Noem, but that's not enough to make it happen in a Republican-controlled House. Much is being made of Republican discontent with Noem, but in the Senate -- where twenty Republican votes to convict would be needed in the event of an impeachment by the House -- only two Republicans, Alaska's Lisa Murkowski and North Carolina's Thom Tillis, have called for Noem's resignation.

It's taken an extraordinary series of events and an unprecedented level of Democratic outrage to get us this far, and it's still not enough. It seems as if it would take twice as much outrage to achieve major personnel changes. There might be more hope for reforms of ICE, however inadequate they might be. But with Trump still at 41% approval and public opinion on ICE abolition still roughly 50-50 (actually 45%-45%, according to a recent Economist/YouGov poll), it's hard to imagine Republicans in Congress breaking with the White House in significant numbers to permit a serious turnaround in how the federal government handles immigration.