ASHER: Hey, NPR POLITICS PODCAST. This is Asher (ph) from the American School of Guadalajara in Mexico. I’m sitting in my AP U.S. history class, getting ready for the opening ceremony of the Guadalajara Model U.N. Conference. This show was recorded at…
TAMARA KEITH, HOST:
12:12 p.m. Eastern time on Friday, January 17.
ASHER: Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but I will be precariously representing Russia in the Security Council. OK, here’s the show.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE BIGTOP ORCHESTRA’S “TEETER BOARD: FOLIES BERGERE (MARCH AND TWO-STEP)”)
KEITH: Well, good luck with that.
DEIRDRE WALSH, BYLINE: That’s a big deal. I did model U.N., and we did not get Russia.
(LAUGHTER)
KEITH: Hey, there. It’s the NPR POLITICS PODCAST. I’m Tamara Keith. I cover the White House.
XIMENA BUSTILLO, BYLINE: I’m Ximena Bustillo, and I cover immigration policy.
WALSH: I’m Deirdre Walsh. I cover Congress.
KEITH: And today on the pod, Kristi Noem of South Dakota is President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to run the Department of Homeland Security, and she faced senators today. Ximena, briefly tell us who Noem is and why Trump picked her.
BUSTILLO: Noem is the current governor of South Dakota. She’s in her second term and really not new to Washington. She was South Dakota’s at-large representative serving in Congress, and Trump picked her because she has been a longtime ally of his. You know, if confirmed, her role would particularly oversee immigration law enforcement agencies, and Noem has a track record of supporting Trump’s immigration policies and proposals.
KEITH: Yeah. And, you know, the Department of Homeland Security was created after 9/11. It is a massive department with an incredibly broad portfolio, from FEMA to Customs and Border Protection. Ximena, what was Noem’s pitch as to why she should get this job?
BUSTILLO: During the hearing, she said that she asked for this job because she knew that homeland defense, and border security specifically, was the president-elect’s No. 1 priority. And she said that she knew it would require someone to have what it takes to carry through what the president has promised and someone, quote, “strong enough to do it.” So she is pitching herself as the person strong enough to carry through Trump’s agenda.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
KRISTI NOEM: We will undertake a large job and a large duty that we have to fulfill – that the American people expect us to do – by securing our border, to make sure that our nation is a nation with borders or we’re no nation at all – and that we are making sure that those criminal actors that are perpetuating violence in our communities and in our cities and towns and states are removed from this country – that there’s consequences for breaking the law in our country again.
BUSTILLO: As you all have discussed on this pod, Trump campaigned in large part on a platform of curbing immigration and strengthening border security, and he says he has a lot of plans. And he’s bringing in people to his team specifically to tackle that, and Noem is one of those.
KEITH: Deirdre, this hearing was incredibly short. This is a big, important department, and you look up, and the hearing’s already over.
WALSH: It was, and I think that’s a sign that senators, regardless of whether or not they’re going to vote for Noem – we expect Republicans to be pretty unified – they know she’s going to get through. So I think the senators on the dais today wanted to make some points and get Noem on the record on some issues, but this has not been a controversial pick. Everyone knows, as Ximena pointed out, that this is what Trump campaigned on. This is a big priority. She will be part of this sort of team that includes others to implement the border security agenda.
KEITH: Some of the hearings have been contentious. How would you rank this one?
WALSH: I mean, I think it’s notable that the top Democrat on the panel, Gary Peters from Michigan, used his time right at the top of the hearing to really focus on issues that are important to Michigan. It’s a state on the Northern border. It’s also notable that Gary Peters is in cycle. He is up for reelection in 2026, in a state that Trump won. But Peters and Democrats know that border security was a big issue in this election and that Democrats were on the defensive. And so I think Peters went out of his way to show that he’s on it and that there are some things in Michigan he wants to make sure that are on Noem’s radar that get done.
KEITH: Deirdre, you said that some senators, at least, were trying to get Noem on the record about things. And I guess this is for both of you, but what were they trying to get her on the record about? What are the important things that were revealed or otherwise clarified through this confirmation hearing?
BUSTILLO: One of the things they wanted to get her on the record about was how she was going to go about handling border security, both in the Southern border, and then, as Deirdre said, there was a lot of focus on the Northern border, even from some of the other senators from states like New Hampshire.
In addition, they wanted to get her on record about how it is that she plans to work with others on Trump’s team. You know, he has selected, I should say, Tom Homan to be a, quote, “border czar.” And so we saw Senator Andy Kim from New Jersey, a Democrat, really ask a lot of pointed questions about what that relationship will be and whether or not she will have control.
But they also asked questions that we’ve heard in other hearings about whether or not she will abide by the law, regardless of what President-elect Trump might want to do. He has made really big promises about overturning things, like birthright citizenship, that have a lot of very constitutional and legal complexities and, you know, whether or not she would basically just kind of follow the law or defend the law and not necessarily have loyalty to the President. So that’s something we heard from Democrats.
WALSH: The other thing Democrats raised in the hearing is there’s another agency under DHS – FEMA – in charge of doling out disaster aid. And Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal pressed Noem on the issue of, will politics come into play when it’s time to respond to a natural disaster? We’re sort of seeing this already in terms of the California wildfires that are playing out sort of across this transition between the Biden administration and the incoming Trump administration. But this hearing was not one of the ones that is sort of, like, closely watched in terms of fireworks and controversy because it’s clear that Noem has the votes.
KEITH: Which means I don’t have to ask you my last question, which is the likelihood of her getting confirmed – she has the votes.
WALSH: She does, but I think on Ximena’s point, I think the question that a lot of senators have about the DHS secretary is, like, how is it going to work in the Trump administration? – because Trump has this border czar, Tom Homan, who does not have to be confirmed by the Senate. And he’s actually been very public out there, talking in great detail about how he plans to do mass deportations.
I mean, he’s sort of shifted the rhetoric in terms of, like, how many can come, right? We heard during the campaign, on Day 1, mass deportations. Homan has sort of focused on, well, we’re going to go after the folks who’ve committed crimes first, the national security risks. But I think that it’s going to be a space to watch in terms of – in practical terms, how these new policies – and we know there’s going to be a lot of new policies – how that’s going to work.
BUSTILLO: Homan’s role has confused a lot of people because it is particularly within the White House. There have been past border czars under other administrations – actually Democratic administrations – but they weren’t out of the White House, and that does make a difference. Like, if you are already working within an agency, then hypothetically, the secretary would oversee that person. But this changes almost, like, the order of operations on who might mandate what. You know, if you have a direct line to the president, and you’re working out of the White House, and you’re out there on national television saying that you’re the one that’s going to be making the decisions on border security – that’s something he has said over and over again – that does raise questions over, well, what are the decisions Noem’s going to do?
WALSH: That may be why a lot of senators aren’t really putting up a big fight about this particular nominee.
KEITH: All right. Well, we are going to leave it there for now. Ximena, thank you so much for sharing your reporting.
BUSTILLO: Thank you.
KEITH: And when we come back, the congressional session is still young, but they are already moving on immigration-related legislation.
And we’re back with NPR senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro. Hello, Domenico.
DOMENICO MONTANARO, BYLINE: Hey, Tam.
KEITH: All right, so Congress has been debating a new piece of immigration legislation called the Laken Riley Act. Domenico, can you remind us of who Laken Riley was and why her story got so much attention, especially in conservative media circles?
MONTANARO: Yeah, and not so much a new piece of legislation because this is something that they voted on last year – passed the House but didn’t pass the Democratic-controlled Senate. But Laken Riley was a 22-year-old nursing student. She was on a jog in Athens, Georgia, where the University of Georgia is and was murdered.
The person convicted of killing her was a 26-year-old Venezuelan man who was in the U.S. without legal status. His name is Jose Ibarra. The background on Ibarra is that he crossed the border in the El Paso, Texas, area. He was caught but released into the country. And as we know, there’s not enough detention space or immigration judges to process migrants who cross the border in any kind of really timely way.
KEITH: Deirdre, explain how this legislation would prevent what happened in that case. How would it work?
WALSH: So this is a targeted bill responding to that specific issue and Laken Riley’s murder. So the bill requires that the Department of Homeland Security, or in this case, ICE – the Immigration and Custom Enforcement – be directed to detain any person who’s in the country without legal status who’s been charged with a crime of theft or burglary.
So in Ibarra’s case, he was issued a citation after being accused of shoplifting from a store. Republicans, at the time of the murder, pointed out this was all about lax criminal enforcement. They argue that if the laws were stricter on cracking down on crime, Riley never would’ve been murdered.
This issue landed in the middle of a presidential campaign. House Republicans quickly moved this bill. It did get a significant amount of House Democratic support at the time. A lot of Democrats in swing districts voted for it. The Senate Democratic leadership did not bring it up, arguing that there was a bipartisan, much more comprehensive immigration reform proposal on the table that Democrats and Republicans had negotiated that did enforcement along with other things.
And so that never moved. Trump didn’t want the Senate to take it up, so it died. And so, obviously, because immigration was front and center in the Trump campaign, House and Senate Republican leadership agreed that this issue would be the first bill that the new Republican Senate would put on the president’s desk, and that’s why this is the first bill they’re debating.
KEITH: You said that there has been some Democratic support for this that continued again in the House. Is there opposition, or what is the opposition to it?
WALSH: So there are concerns from Democrats and, I think, from some outside libertarian groups that this targeted bill, focused on enforcement, has due process issues, potentially. That is one argument I’ve heard from Democrats who opposed it. Another issue is that there’s a provision in the bill that empowers attorneys general at the state level with some new authority that some argue is really a federal authority – that the federal government’s job is border security and that it sort of improperly delegates some of this to the states.
KEITH: Deirdre, though, I do want to ask you about the politics here because there are Democrats who support it. Does this indicate a shift in the way Democrats are approaching immigration since the election?
WALSH: No doubt. There has been a massive shift on Capitol Hill among Congressional Democrats on the issue of immigration. It is clear – and many have said to me and a lot of other reporters – that Democrats did not adequately respond to voters’ concerns about border security enforcement issues in border states, in swing states, in states that have a trickle-down effect from issues related to border security.
This time around, 48 House Democrats voted for the Laken Riley Bill. That was an increase based on last year. The procedural vote just to get to open debate on this bill – 33 Senate Democrats voted to get on it, including Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer. This is a bill that they denigrated in the last Congress and called sort of partisan politics.
There is a recognition among congressional Democrats, especially those who are facing election. We talked about Gary Peters earlier in the pod, but there are a host of Senate Democrats who voted to end debate and clear a path for this bill to get passed next week. Democrats are really still pretty split over how they talk about border security, but there’s been a shift in terms of the rhetoric. More Democrats are talking about enforcement, border security, boosting funding, while still saying they want a path to citizenship, but recognizing that comprehensive immigration reform is probably not going to happen any time soon.
MONTANARO: You know, during the campaign – during the presidential campaign, immigration obviously was one of those issues that was bubbling just beneath inflation and prices and all of those economic issues. And, you know, it was often tied to crime. It was something that right-wing media focused on quite heavily. And, you know, it started to work for Republicans and for Donald Trump because obviously, this was something that Donald Trump ran on when he first came on the political scene. And we saw that bear out in the polls, where you saw people trusting Trump and Republicans far more than Democrats when it came to immigration in particular.
KEITH: And, Domenico, we have a new poll that included questions on immigration and about what Americans want done. What did it say?
MONTANARO: Well, the biggest thing – obviously, one of the big priorities that Trump says that he wants to do is to deport all people in the United States without legal status as quickly as he possibly can. We’re talking about millions of people. And we asked about that, and we’ve asked about and we’ve gotten different results here and there. But what we found overall is that people are pretty split. Forty-nine percent said that they support doing that. Forty-nine percent said that they oppose it. And when you look at Democrats and Republicans, 74% of Democrats – three-quarters – say that they’re opposed to this. Four in five Republicans, though, say that they do support it. And of that, the intensity of support with Republicans is really what’s fascinating because over 50% of Republicans say that they strongly support mass deportations.
KEITH: So, Deirdre, this has passed the House. What is the status in the Senate? And if this were to pass and it would get to the president’s desk, he certainly would sign it, President Trump. Would this be the first major or minor immigration legislation to pass and become law in a long time?
WALSH: I mean, it looks like it’s got a pathway to be coming President-elect Trump’s desk. So there was one small change since the Senate’s taken up the bill. That means when the Senate approves it – and we expect that they will shortly – it will go back to the House. The House is expected to vote again and easily pass it, and then it will go to the president’s desk for him to sign.
And our colleague Ximena has a story about the estimate for how much it would be to enforce this law. That’s a whole separate conversation. Republicans are already making plans in one of their first massive legislative packages to include a major boost for immigration and border security enforcement – money.
KEITH: All right, well, we are going to take one more break, and then it’s time for Can’t Let It Go.
And we’re back, and it’s time for Can’t Let It Go, the part of the pod where we talk about the things from the week that we just cannot stop thinking about, politics or otherwise. Domenico, you’re up.
MONTANARO: I can’t stop thinking about love.
KEITH: Love. True love.
MONTANARO: It’s just a love story that I read about in The New York Times that just really had me, you know, really in awe. They started kind of dating and talking to each other. And, you know, she really started to fall in love with this guy who really listened and, you know, was there for her whenever she needed. Really great story – and you find out he’s AI.
KEITH: Oh.
WALSH: Oh.
KEITH: This is not a nice story, Domenico.
WALSH: That’s not a good story.
(LAUGHTER)
WALSH: That’s not true love.
MONTANARO: (Laughter) Well, there…
WALSH: Artificial love.
MONTANARO: There are sex therapists quoted in the story who would disagree with you because they say that it’s about neurotransmitters, and that’s what’s really important. We’re going into a new era, friends.
KEITH: Oh.
MONTANARO: (Laughter).
KEITH: I don’t even know what to think. It’s kind of scary.
WALSH: I feel bad for the next generation. I mean, how does that work on, like, a dating app (laughter), if you don’t know if the person’s a real person or an AI person?
KEITH: Maybe this will get us all to be in-person more.
MONTANARO: Well, no, this is – she chose to – she knew this was AI. She did this through ChatGPT, you know, and set the settings so…
KEITH: Wow.
MONTANARO: …That the person – the person – the AI bot would do what she wanted, would talk to her the way she wanted, would act the way she would want a boyfriend to act. And the real kicker here, which you don’t get to till midway through the story, is that…
KEITH: Giving it away.
MONTANARO: …She has a husband.
KEITH: Oh, no.
WALSH: Oh.
MONTANARO: She has a real-life husband.
KEITH: Oh, my God.
WALSH: Oh.
KEITH: What does that say about her real-life husband, that she had to have…
MONTANARO: And guess what? The real-life husband’s cool with it.
KEITH: Wow.
WALSH: Wow.
MONTANARO: I don’t know, y’all.
WALSH: There’s so many layers to this story that are disturbing, Domenico.
(LAUGHTER)
KEITH: Wow.
MONTANARO: Please go read…
WALSH: I definitely need to read this one.
MONTANARO: …The love story of Ayrin and Leo.
KEITH: Wow. All right.
WALSH: (Laughter).
KEITH: Deirdre, what can’t you let go of?
WALSH: So I’m hoping this is a little bit more uplifting – straight-up uplifting – because there’s been so much really sad and depressing news about the wildfires in California. Natural disasters are just terrible events to have to cover.
I saw this story on NBC News. There was this amazing, heartwarming story about this man who lives in the Pacific Palisades. He was not at home when the fires started. He had two dogs at home, and he was completely freaking out about whether or not they were going to make it out, so he drove and couldn’t get into his neighborhood. And the firefighters went to his house, which was still standing but was in the line of fire and was under threat and somehow got one dog out.
So one dog escaped, so he was reunited with his one dog. But his second dog was missing – Oreo. So he put up flyers all over the neighborhood looking for Oreo, and five days later, Oreo was found and he was reunited with his dog. It’s – it, like, made me cry, it was so heartwarming.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
CASEY COLVIN: Oh, honey. Oh, honey. Oh, my God, you’re alive.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: It’s the happy ending Casey prayed for.
COLVIN: Oh, honey. Oh.
WALSH: So this dog owner was over the moon – so exciting – yelling and screaming in the street that he was reunited with Oreo. And his second dog was with him, who he took to find Oreo. And he put, like, dog bowls out and items of his clothing so that Oreo would smell him. He totally credits the LA Fire Department for freeing the dogs from his house because his house was completely destroyed.
KEITH: Wow.
MONTANARO: Oh.
WALSH: They showed pictures of him going back, and there was nothing left. But his two dogs made it out. And it was sad that he lost everything, but he was really grateful to the firefighter. And he did this interview with the firefighter, completely crediting him with saving his family.
What about you, Tam? What can’t you let of?
KEITH: The weather – I’m, like, a total weather bug. Here in Washington, D.C., we have the Capital Weather Gang, which is part of The Washington Post. I obsessively read the Capital Weather Gang, and I am here to tell you that an arctic blast is headed for Washington, D.C.
WALSH: We do not handle arctic blasts very well in Washington, D.C.
KEITH: We do not. It’s going to be so cold, and so cold, in fact, that the inauguration, the swearing-in for President Trump, was just announced it is now being moved indoors because it is going to be so cold.
I found this most amazing page on weather.gov. The National Weather Service has been tracking inaugural weather at noon, at the time of the swearing-in. And the only inauguration that would be colder than the one that we are expecting this year is Ronald Reagan’s in 1985, where it was 7 degrees, sunny but bitter cold. With wind chill, the temperatures fell into the negative 10s and negative 20s. So that was worse. They are moving it indoors this year, though, because it is also going to be very, very bad, the worst inaugural weather in 40 years.
MONTANARO: You know, we had a president die after a really cold and wet inaugural, William Henry Harrison. In 1841 he gave what’s still the longest inaugural address, over two hours.
KEITH: Ooh.
MONTANARO: He wore no hat, gloves or coat.
KEITH: They are expecting wind chills to be 9 degrees, just a balmy 9 degrees.
WALSH: Wow. The last ones have not been that cold, so I feel bad for all these people that have traveled from all over the country, thinking that D.C. is probably not, like, as cold as a lot of the places where they live, and it’s going to be really, really cold.
KEITH: They were not counting on an Arctic blast.
All right, that is it for now. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi. Casey Morell edits the podcast. Our producers are Bria Suggs and Kelli Wessinger. Special thanks to Kelsey Snell.
I’m Tamara Keith. I cover the White House.
WALSH: I’m Deirdre Walsh. I cover Congress.
MONTANARO: And I’m Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent.
KEITH: And thank you for listening to the NPR POLITICS PODCAST.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE BIGTOP ORCHESTRA’S “TEETER BOARD: FOLIES BERGERE (MARCH AND TWO-STEP)”
Copyright © 2025 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
