Thom Tillis blasts Kristi Noem’s ‘disaster’ leadership over mass deportations

WASINGTON, DC: On Tuesday, Republican Sen. Thom Tillis, who is retiring in January, criticized Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem during a Senate hearing on immigration enforcement.

The hearing focused on ICE enforcement actions and the number of deportations under Noem’s leadership. Tillis objected to the focus on high deportation figures, calling it counterproductive.

Tillis’s criticism of Noem’s deportation numbers

At the hearing, Tillis questioned the emphasis on daily deportation totals, citing figures like “1,000 a day, 6,000 a day, 9,000 a day.” He said, “Numbers matter, right? No, they don’t matter. Quality matters, not quantity,” and warned that the approach was creating a “disaster under your leadership.”

He also raised concerns about US citizens being wrongfully detained. “What we've seen is innocent people getting detained that turn out are American citizens. I could talk about the culture that's been created here. With Stephen Miller aiding and abetting, I heard first reports that he was the one that said it was a domestic terror situation where two people lost their lives in Minneapolis,” Tillis said. 

Tillis has previously supported policies to help companies hire migrant workers and suggested that White House adviser Stephen Miller was pushing for higher deportation numbers instead of selective enforcement.

Noem’s defense of ICE operations

Noem responded by outlining what she described as successes under her leadership. She said daily encounters at the southwest border had declined by 96 percent compared to the Biden administration’s daily average, and that Border Patrol had released zero unauthorized migrants into the interior for 10 consecutive months.

“In Trump’s historic first year back in office, nearly 3 million illegal aliens have left the United States as a result of the administration’s enforcement efforts from following the law,” Noem said. She added that 2.2 million left voluntarily and more than 675,000 were deported.

Noem emphasized that most ICE arrests involved individuals with criminal records or secondary offenses and pointed to broader public safety gains. “We have also the lowest murder rate in the last 125 years,” she said.

Sen. Eric Schmitt also defended enforcement policies, arguing that prior lax border approaches had allowed preventable crimes to occur.