Long a target of the Trump administration’s ire, Colbert got to turn the animus around after Noem got the sack.

Stephen Colbert gleefully announces Kristi Noem’s firing: ‘Someone’s about to become the FIFA secretary of Homeland Security’

Long a target of the Trump administration's ire, Colbert got to turn the animus around after Noem got the sack.

By Ryan Coleman

Ryan Coleman

Ryan Coleman is a news writer for with previous work in MUBI Notebook, Slant, and the LA Review of Books.

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March 5, 2026 11:53 p.m. ET

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Stephen Colbert and Kristi Noem. Credit:

Scott Kowalchyk/CBS; Mandel NGAN / AFP via Getty

It's going to be a hard night for former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem — which just makes Stephen Colbert's night all the sweeter.

President Donald Trump initiated the first major shake-up to his second-term Cabinet on Thursday, when he announced that Noem, who has led DHS through its increasingly unpopular crackdown on immigration, would be stepping down in short order.

Long a target of the Trump administration's ire, Colbert wasted no time launching into a celebration of Noem's premature exit during the opening monologue to Thursday's episode of *The Late Show With Stephen Colbert*.

"Well it's a rainy night here in New York," he began before the show's live studio audience, which erupted into applause after he abruptly pivoted, "Okay enough of that. Let's talk about Kristi Noem getting fired!"

"She's out, she's gone. Her fault for standing too close to that gravel pit," Colbert joked in reference to a controversial moment from Noem's 2024 memoir *No Going Back*, in which she admits to personally putting down her dog Cricket and depositing the pet's body in a gravel pit.

"It's too soon to know why Kristi Noem is gone. Before we find out any information about what happened, I just want to say with absolute certainty, she is a domestic terrorist who deserves to go to GTMO," Colbert continued, colloquially referring to the high-security American detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, on the southern coast of Cuba.

Colbert quickly joked, "I'm sorry, I'm being told that's not true. But you know what, I acted on the information we had at the time." Again, Colbert laced his seemingly innocuous words with digs at Noem, this time to her repeated decision to brand American citizens killed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement Officers as criminals before any investigation into their deaths had been conducted.

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In his Truth Social post announcing Noem's firing, or rather, reassignment, Trump celebrated the appointment of relatively newly elected Oklahoman senator Markwayne Mullin to the head of DHS, while Noem, "who has served us well, and has had numerous and spectacular results (especially on the Border!), will be moving to be Special Envoy for The Shield of the Americas, our new Security Initiative in the Western Hemisphere."

Colbert didn't think much of Noem's new gig, joking that it "sounds like someone's about to become the FIFA secretary of Homeland Security."

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It was another joke based on a current event in Trump world. This time, to the international soccer federation making up an award to give Trump in a December ceremony lambasted by Colbert's late-night colleague Seth Meyers.

"Donald Trump got a fake peace prize from FIFA and said we should change the name of American football because soccer is the real football," Meyers joked on *Late Night *at the time, "something that would have made Donald Trump furious if anyone besides Donald Trump had said it."

Donald Trump and Kristi Noem at the White House in 2025.

Anna Moneymaker/Getty

Before her appointment to the head of DHS, Noem served as the governor of South Dakota from 2019 to 2025.

Her tenure as a cabinet secretary has been mired with scandal, from allegations of an inappropriate relationship with a top aide, to concern that she may have been mishandling funds — and lying about it.

A November ProPublica report found that Noem had been directing hundreds of millions of dollars appropriated for a DHS ad campaign to companies owned by her close associates, some of which had only been incorporated days before the were awarded contracts.

When pressed about those findings in Congress, Noem claimed that Trump approved of the ad spend. But when reached for comment on Thursday, the president told Reuters, "I never knew anything about it." A few hours later, he published the Truth Social post announcing Noem's reassignment.

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