While he breaks from the incoming Trump administration on talk of using the National Guard for mass deportations, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., incoming chair of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, is going to help push South Dakota GOP Gov. Kristi Noem through as DHS secretary.
"My first order of business will be getting her confirmed, and I plan on trying to do that either the day of the inauguration or that week," Paul told host John Catsimatidis on Sunday's "The Cats Roundtable" on WABC 77 FM-N.Y.
Noem has sent South Dakota National Guard to the southern border to help Republican states like Texas do the job the Biden administration was derelict in doing with illegal migration, but Paul has expressed he opposes using the National Guard to help border czar Tom Homan and Immigration and Customs Enforcement conduct mass deportation of criminal illegal aliens, starting with those in jail, who have committed crimes, or facing criminal charges.
"They're not trained to get a warrant to do what they're doing," Paul told Newsmax's "Rob Schmitt Tonight" last month. "The police have a difficult job, but the people removing people from our country need to be a police enforcement domestic agency, not the military."
But Noem had sent her National Guard thousands of miles away to the southern border for security and not deportations.
"We sent our Guard because they're used to the war zone that they're going to see down there at the border," Noem said in 2021. "They're prepared and trained for it and they can deal with it."
Then, last February she sent the Guard to help build the wall the Biden administration stopped construction of.
"The border is a war zone, so we're sending soldiers," Noem said then. "These soldiers' primary mission will be construction of a wall to stem the flow of illegal immigrants, drug cartels, and human trafficking into the United States of America."
Noem was President-elect Donald Trump's pick to be secretary of Homeland Security, a post held by Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who House Republicans tried to impeach for refusing to enforce U.S. immigration law.