Tracey Mumford

He has been critical of the Trump administration.

He said the most likely explanation was target misidentification, that forces attacked without realizing there may have been large numbers of civilians inside.

President Trump's firing yesterday of Kristi Noem as the Secretary of Homeland Security marked the first time he's ousted a cabinet member this term.

Noem had made herself the face of his aggressive deportation campaign, but she also presided over a long string of controversies that drew negative attention to the administration and frustrated White House officials.

Her firing this week comes after her testimony at back-to-back congressional hearings, which appears to have been the tipping point for the president.

Lawmakers of both parties pressed Noem on how she's run the agency.

They questioned the statement she made after immigration agents shot and killed two U.S.

citizens in Minneapolis.

And they pushed her on the slow rollout of disaster relief funds.

Some lawmakers also zeroed in on an ad campaign her department ran starring her.

You cross the border illegally, we'll find you.

Break our laws, we'll punish you.

One of the ads featured the secretary on horseback in front of Mount Rushmore.

Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana described the campaign as wasteful, and he grilled Noem on a ProPublica report about just how much the department spent on the ads.

My colleague Hamed Ali Aziz is on today's episode of The Daily, explaining how Noem gained and then lost the president's trust.

In a statement on social media, President Trump said he's giving Noem a new job that's just been created, Special Envoy for the Shield of the Americas, which he said would be a new security initiative.

He plans to replace her at DHS with Mark Wayne Mullen, a Republican senator from Oklahoma.

Funding for the Department of Homeland Security, though, is still lapsed.

Yesterday, Senate Democrats blocked another spending bill for the agency.

They continue to say they won't approve anything without new restrictions on immigration agents.