EXCLUSIVE — Before Kristi Noem was even out the door, her more than 10 framed glamour shots hanging on the walls of one of her Washington offices were being taken down by staff. Department of Homeland Security employees at one agency were eager, even tearful, about the future.
Her replacement, former Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin, is quickly finding his way into his new role atop the nation’s third-largest federal department and its more than a quarter of a million employees.
Within 24 hours of being sworn in at the White House surrounded by family on Wednesday, Mullin had rolled up his sleeves and begun undoing the unprecedented regulations that Noem and her cohort, Corey Lewandowski, had imposed across the department.
“He has the opportunity to be like a prince or knight in shining armor as he comes riding over the hill and saves everybody from this freaking chaos,” a senior official within DHS said in a phone call Wednesday evening. “All he has to do, literally, is put things back in a normal order.”
The Washington Examiner spoke with five current and former senior department officials, as well as two sources familiar with Noem’s management, to piece together what Noem’s final days and Mullin’s first ones on the job entailed.
A fighter meets his fight
President Donald Trump had planned for Mullin, a former U.S. senator and mixed martial arts fighter, to take over for Noem on March 31, but the Senate moved quickly with his confirmation, allowing Noem to hit the road early. She has since been shifted into a new position as Special Envoy for the Western Hemisphere.
Much of Mullin’s work over the next few weeks and months will include getting up to speed on the intricacies of immigration policy, one of Trump’s top issues, as well as learning about the various missions of the nearly two dozen offices and agencies under his control.
But Mullin will simultaneously be putting out fires that senior officials say were set by Noem and Lewandowski, a special government employee who is reported to have engaged in an extramarital affair with Noem since 2019.
The only upside to how Noem and Lewandowski secretly controlled agency operations was that the majority of rank-and-file employees were not affected by it, according to the first official. The downside was that the vast majority of DHS personnel had no idea how chaotic it got at the senior levels within agencies.
“[Corey] is constantly threatening to fire people,” a second person said. “His go-to is, ‘I’ll just fire your ass. You don’t want to be here and do the mission. I’ll just fire your ass.’”
The duo even cracked down on agency communications with media, forbidding long-standing career spokespeople and political appointees from giving statements to the press without prior approval from DHS. The first official said the lockdown on public affairs specialists across the department was “worse” than how the Biden administration’s DHS had cracked down.
“I never in a million years thought anything like this would happen,” the same person said. “It got very ugly to say the least.”
Mullin will quickly have to remake the department’s approach to interior immigration enforcement, stabilize tanking public support for deportations, and shift DHS’s public messaging away from meme-driven and combative posts that have been plastered across the department’s social media accounts for the last year.
One such post lifted an illustration by Japanese illustrator Hiroshi Nagai and added “America After 100 Million Deportations,” along with the caption: “The peace of a nation no longer besieged by the third world.”
In Mullin’s first 24 hours, he greenlighted the department’s retrieval of federally owned social media accounts that now-retired Border Patrol agent Gregory Bovino had taken over from Border Patrol for more than eight months amid his tour from city to city, arresting illegal immigrants.
The many images of Bovino wearing an SS-style coat and responding personally to comments on the government pages disappeared midday on Thursday. It was one of Mullin’s first steps to correcting course, the first official said.
Congressman Bennie Thompson says Greg Bovino’s Border Patrol-issued jacket is “Nazi attire” and then displays an AI image of Alex Pretti being shot by a headless ICE agent.pic.twitter.com/a49asl7rXb
— Bruce Snyder (@realBruceSnyder) February 10, 2026
Lifting Noem’s unprecedented policies
Mullin’s biggest to-dos are expected to center on letting agencies fill vacancies that they have carried since January 2025 due to Noem’s refusal to allow agency leaders to approve promotions within their agencies.
All managerial and senior promotions had to be approved by Noem and Lewandowski, in what three officials speculated was a move to ensure those who moved up the ladder were people they could influence and benefit from having in those roles.
When Noem and Lewandowski did not like an employee, they pushed them out of their job. In just one agency, 15 senior staff were put on administrative leave, moved to a different agency, or fired. Lewandowski has already left the department, a DHS spokesperson told the Washington Examiner.
DHS agencies have been plagued with vacancies for 14 months as the result of Noem’s slow-walking permanent hires department-wide. Internal selections of career officials to promote were ignored by Noem across agencies, which prevented people from being in a position to make decisions and added to the workloads of more senior officials.
A fourth official, who previously served in management within Border Patrol, said it was imperative that Mullin rely on the career staff across the department because they have proven capable of continuing to run it despite the negative impacts from previous leadership.
“Number one thing, you just trust your career people, the people that have been in those positions their entire career. Listen to what they have to say and trust them with that,” the official said, adding that Mullin would also be smart to rely on the four decades of federal law enforcement experience in White House border czar Tom Homan. “Tom’s the WWE of immigration or border.”
Mullin is expected to lift Noem’s self-imposed review of all department contracts valued at more than $100,000. As of early March, more than 1,000 contracts were awaiting Noem’s approval, according to The Hill.
Mullin will also face congressional Democrats’ wrath as lawmakers on Capitol Hill have already begun to investigate DHS for the massive contracts to individuals and companies that were inexperienced, had connections to Noem’s staff, or contained other irregularities.
Fallout from Minneapolis
A mass deportation campaign that was first described by the White House as being about arresting and deporting the “worst of the worst” quickly became a numbers game in which DHS pushed for quantity of arrests, rather than focusing on targeting criminal illegal immigrants.
Noem and Lewandowski tapped Border Patrol’s El Centro, California, Chief Greg Bovino, to singlehandedly lead Border Patrol operations in the interior of the country, assisting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
After descending on several cities in mid-2025 through early 2026, the operations devolved into chaos in Minneapolis, and Noem was forced to remove Bovino from his job overseeing the at-large operations, as public support in polls declined swiftly following the fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens.
Homan was dispatched to Minneapolis for several weeks and steered the operation to focus instead on arresting specific violent illegal immigrants and those already ordered to be deported by a judge, rather than approaching or arresting illegal immigrants in public.
But as Noem came under more criticism for the more than $200 million contract DHS paid for advertising to an organization that was less than two weeks old, DHS announced plans to erect nearly 500 miles of border wall in a part of the U.S.-Mexico border that Border Patrol itself recommended technology, not a wall, be used to secure.
A former Border Patrol official familiar with the agency’s long-standing plans for securing the region said the Big Bend region of southcentral and western Texas is a place that’s “never had wall, never had plans for wall.”
Immediately following the announcement, pushback from Democrats and Republicans in the region led DHS to quietly cancel those border wall plans.
Agency leader haunted
All the while, Noem and Lewandowski were determined to push out Senate-confirmed CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott in hopes of bringing up Border Patrol’s national chief, Mike Banks.
Three people told the Washington Examiner that Scott had become paranoid that Lewandowski was spying on him through his work phone and had bugged his office. Scott believed Lewandowski was trying to find anything that could persuade Trump to fire Scott, since Noem lacked the authority to do so herself.
One person said he saw Scott’s privacy concern on display during a visit to CBP’s headquarters this winter.
“I went up to see [Scott] in his office,” the same person said, adding that he received a message from Scott as he arrived that Scott was outside the agency’s office space in a separate, public area of the building.
“Rodney had his cell phones in a Faraday bag,” the source said.
Faraday bags are containers made of conductive materials, including metal or aluminum-coated fabric, capable of blocking all electromagnetic signals, and are used to shield cell phones from surveillance.
“I had never seen that outside of the intel community, where somebody’s putting their phones in a bag so they’re not emanating and can’t be monitored,” the same person said. “I went ahead and put my phone in the bag, and that’s when we had the conversation.”
Noem’s glamour shots on display
What can only be described as glamour shots of Noem lined the walls and halls inside her spacious office at CBP’s headquarters, although officials familiar with Noem’s visits to the building say she rarely set foot in that office.
As secretary, Noem had offices in every agency’s headquarters. Not long after she took office last January, her team removed the existing pictures of federal agents in boats, on horseback, and in helicopters.
“Every single picture had a picture of Noem, and it was such a turn off,” a fourth official said. “People were snickering about it, like, ‘Did you see the upgrade?’ No leader that I know would have allowed that to happen. If they walked in and saw their photo in every picture, they would say, ‘What were you thinking?’”
The framed pictures included one of Noem standing between Border Patrol agents with a hand on each of their shoulders, looking into the distance as she boards a CBP helicopter while sporting oversized sunglasses; one of herself flying an airplane; and one of herself riding an all-terrain vehicle while wearing pearl earrings and a pearl necklace with a bulletproof vest.
One hall of her office had a picture of Noem riding an all-terrain vehicle, followed by federal agents, as if she were leading the charge into battle.
In another picture, the four federal employees sitting next to Noem are out of focus, while Noem is perfectly in focus, sporting an ICE ball cap with the agency’s new logo.
DHS: 100,000 EMPLOYEES UNPAID AMID SHUTDOWN
One person said Lewandowski may have been behind the Noem-centric photo gallery. She may have been so insulated that she was unaware that people within agencies did not approve of her, the seventh official said.
In the days following Noem’s fall from the president’s graces and her termination, the pictures were taken down.
