Jeffries vows to call Kristi Noem to testify in long-overdue oversight push 

When House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries promised that Kristi Noem would be one of the first called before Congress if Democrats take the majority in 2026, he wasn’t just previewing political theater — he was signaling a long-overdue accountability moment.   

Because what we’ve seen under Noem’s watch as Homeland Security secretary isn’t just controversial policy, it’s a collision between power and the Constitution.  

Listen, the government has every right to deport violent criminals. But what we’re talking about here isn’t that. These are families being ripped apart, U.S. citizen children deported to countries they’ve never known, and raids on churches, swap meets and sidewalks that read less like lawful arrests and more like kidnappings in broad daylight.   

Armed, masked agents storming neighborhoods — it looks less like “law and order” and more like a scene from a dystopian movie. Except it’s not fiction. It’s happening here.  

And at the center of it is Secretary Noem, who, when asked to define “habeas corpus” earlier this year — which, by the way, is a bedrock constitutional right — got it flat-out wrong. She described it as the president’s power to deport people. That’s not just a slip of the tongue; that’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the very principle that protects all of us from government overreach. Habeas corpus is the right of a person to challenge their detention. Without it, the government could lock up anyone indefinitely.   

Even Abraham Lincoln had to go to Congress before suspending it during the Civil War. Yet somehow, Kristi Noem thinks she can redefine it on the fly.  

Meanwhile, lawsuits are piling up. The ACLU and others say these mass raids aren’t about justice, they’re about quotas. Three thousand arrests a day, demanded from the White House, no matter who gets caught in the dragnet. The result? Overcrowded, dungeon-like detention centers, families denied food, water and lawyers. That’s not just cruel — it’s unconstitutional. And it costs taxpayers millions to warehouse people who pose no threat to society.  

Jeffries is right: this calls for oversight. Not partisan point-scoring, but a public examination of what happens when immigration policy is driven by fear, politics and raw numbers instead of law, due process and human dignity. Because if the government can strip immigrants of rights today, what’s to stop them from doing the same to citizens tomorrow?  

Kristi Noem may soon face Congress, but make no mistake — this is bigger than her. It’s about whether America will continue to twist the meaning of justice until it serves whoever holds power, or whether we’ll insist that justice, in this country, still means something.  

This isn’t about Kristi Noem forgetting her civics lesson. It’s about whether America still remembers its own.  

Lindsey Granger is a News Nation contributor and co-host of The Hill’s commentary show “Rising.” This column is an edited transcription of her on-air commentary.