Kristi Noem slams Illinois governor, state's sanctuary policies; Pritzker claps back
SPRINGFIELD, Ill. – Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was in Springfield Wednesday to make remarks on Illinois' sanctuary state policies and Gov. JB Pritzker's leadership.
'Governor Pritzker has created a sanctuary here for those criminals and invited them here with free healthcare, free housing, free assistance and facilitated them be protected from being brought to justice. People are dying every day because of these polices,' Noem said during a press conference.
The press conference was orginally scheduled to take place at 10 a.m. Wednesday outside the Governor's Mansion, but that did not happen and it is unclear why.
Noem, along with other Trump administration officials, have argued such policies shield immigrants, accused of crimes, from facing consequence.
Among those joining the secretary on Wednesday were families, who she says, have allegedly lost loved ones at the hands of people illegally in the U.S.
Noem attacked Pritzker while at the podium, but Pritzker had some snark of his own ahead of her visit.
'We would urge all pet owners in the region to make sure all of your beloved animals are under watchful protection while the secretary is in the region.'
Pritzker's comment making reference to controversy over Noem's decision to kill a dog, detailed in her memoir.
The governor also released the following statement in response to Noem's visit to Illinois:
Unlike Donald Trump and Kristi Noem, Illinois follows the law.
The Trump Administration is violating the United States Constitution, denying people due process, and disappearing law-abiding neighbors – including children who are U.S. citizens. Yet, they are taking no real action to promote public safety and deport violent criminals within the clear and defined legal process.
Trump-Noem publicity stunts do not make our communities safer or our immigration system smarter. Illinois doesn't need to abuse power or ignore the Constitution to keep our people safe. Like the millions of Americans asking for sensible, humane immigration reform, I encourage the Secretary to spend less time performing for Fox News and more time protecting the Homeland.
Secretary Noem must have not realized she was visiting during Latino Unity Day where we come together celebrate the vibrancy and diversity of our community. Today, Secretary Noem was met by a force stronger than her: the people of Illinois.
Illinoisans are sending a clear message to Trump's lackeys that we will not let you mess with us without a resistance.'
Gov. JB Pritzker
Pritzker will be heading to Washington in June to testify about Illinois' sanctuary policies.
The U.S. House Oversight Committee requested him, the Governor of Minnesota Tim Walz and New York's Governor Kathy Hochul.
Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias also held a press conference Wednesday in Springfield, seemingly fired up about Noem's visit and the Trump administration's handling of mass deportations.
'I think about this monster Donald Trump, and I think about these dangerously, incompetent and cruel people like Kristi Noem. Who instead of focusing on leadership and helping others and welcoming people, they are scaring the sh** out of people and sending them to other countries without due process,' Giannoulias said.
Now, Homeland Security posts pictures regularly to social media highlighting the arrests of immigrants with criminal backgrounds. But that said, the agency has refused, since January, to provide data to WGN News about the number of ICE arrests in the Chicago area, how many of those have a criminal history and how many have actually been removed from the country.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to WGN-TV.
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Axios
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As Trump administration aims to boost mining, drilling and fishing, Spokane office dedicated to workers' safety remains in jeopardy
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In response to an earlier inquiry, HHS said on May 22 that Kennedy "has been working hard to ensure that the critical functions under NIOSH remain intact" and that "ensuring the health and safety of our workforce remains a top priority for the Department." In the May 2 emails, reviewed by The Spokesman-Review, NIOSH employees were told their termination "does not reflect directly on your service, performance, or conduct" and was happening because "your duties have been identified as either unnecessary or virtually identical to duties being performed elsewhere in the agency." Contrary to that explanation, documents and emails obtained by The Spokesman-Review show that Kennedy eliminated entire divisions of NIOSH, leaving virtually no one to focus on safety for hard-rock miners, oil and gas workers, commercial fishermen, farmworkers or wildland firefighters. 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It will ultimately be Congress, he said, that decides how much funding NIOSH gets. "These are things that were done by the DOGE people, and they were people who didn't have the same experience of dealing with the overall budget as we do up here," Risch said, noting that employees at the Department of Government Efficiency have admitted that they have made mistakes. "When we sat down with the DOGE guys, they said, 'Look, we were given a job. We went and did this job. We understand you guys are experts on this. When we're done, it's going to be up to you,'" Risch said. "What we're going to do is take a healthy look at what these jobs entail. It's going to be looked at seriously and responsibly through the appropriations process." Murray, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, has been less patient with Kennedy and DOGE, which was spearheaded by billionaire Elon Musk before his public falling-out with Trump last week. In an interview on Wednesday, the Washington senator said she has repeatedly tried and failed to reach the HHS secretary's team, joking that they must have also fired everyone who answered the phones. "We are looking at all the options, obviously, for next year," Murray said. "Writing our appropriations bills, looking at language, working in a bipartisan way, to make sure that funds that we, Congress, decide are appropriated will actually have to be implemented by the administration." The Spokane Research Lab also has support in the House from Rep. Michael Baumgartner, a Spokane Republican who has written two letters calling on Kennedy to reconsider the termination of its employees and visited the facility on Tuesday. Baumgartner's office didn't say whether he had received a response to either letter from the HHS secretary. The Spokane facility's nationwide reach has earned it support from other influential Republicans in Congress, including Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota. In a Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing on March 20, Rounds told Kennedy that terminating NIOSH jobs in Spokane had resulted in the loss of a $1.2 million mine safety grant to the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology, which also relies on NIOSH for "critical technical support." "We need to protect our miners," Kennedy replied, pledging to work with Rounds' office. "We need to protect them because they are the future of our country." In a hearing of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, Murkowski asked Trump's nominee to lead the Occupational Safety and Health Administration — a regulatory agency that relies on NIOSH research — how he would do his job without data from NIOSH. The nominee, David Keeling, replied that it would be difficult, but he would consider replacing NIOSH with "private entities." Asked why she thinks the Trump administration eliminated the NIOSH jobs, Murkowski told The Spokesman-Review on Thursday, "They were looking for cuts, and as we've seen in many departments, it seems somewhat indiscriminate and arbitrary." "I think what we're working through still is some of the DOGE recommendations, where you're not fully appreciating the role and the function of many of these federal employees," she said. "My hope is that they're going to be actually looking at this now and realizing we need this information." Murkowski said she has stressed to Kennedy how important NIOSH is for Alaska's commercial fisheries. Another concern, she said, is that valuable researchers could choose to leave public service while their jobs are in limbo. "When you are sending the signal to that federal employee that maybe what you've been doing is not what we want to continue, people are making their own determinations and leaving, and now we've got all these vacancies," Murkowski said. "I think you're going to see a resettling. I just don't know when." After earning an engineering degree at the Colorado School of Mines, Stazick worked in the private sector before she took a job with NIOSH at the Spokane Research Laboratory in 2020. She knew it would mean taking a pay cut but liked working to improve workers' safety, not just a company's bottom line. "It was a really big incentive for me to go and take a big pay cut and go into the public sector," said Stazick, 27. "With this engineering degree that I could be using to make someone a bunch of money, it just felt nice that the work I was doing was affecting people's lives and safety." NIOSH named Stazick one of its "rising stars" in 2022, and she developed her expertise in the corrosion of metal support structures for underground mines. She worked with miners to replace bolts that were corroding within six months — causing roof failures — with more durable materials. "It's just upsetting," she said of the mass layoffs. "I'm at a career transition point again. I had found something I was really passionate about. So, yeah, the whole thing has been upsetting." Stazick's colleague Brad Seymour, another mining engineer and union steward, is at the other end of his career. When he started at the Spokane facility in 1986, it was run by the now-defunct U.S. Bureau of Mines. He planned to work for about one more year, to make it an even 40. "The thing that's discouraging about it is that I don't think it was discussed well within the leadership," Seymour said of the mass firing. "So it came as a shock to everybody. And because of that, the cuts were not handled in a very thoughtful manner." Seymour has dedicated his career to helping miners prevent collapses and "rock bursts" caused by the extreme pressure in deep underground mines. That's in the interest of mining companies, but he said the engineers working for companies don't have the time or the incentives to do the kind of research that happens at NIOSH, which benefits the whole industry. Coeur d'Alene-based Hecla Mining was forced to close its Lucky Friday Mine in Mullan for more than a year and spend over $30 million in improvements after accidents killed two miners and injured seven more in 2011. A spokesman for Hecla declined to comment on NIOSH research. Early in his career, Seymour worked to improve cemented backfill methods — where miners fill underground voids with mill tailings and other material to prevent cave-ins — at the Cannon Mine in Wenatchee. Those improvements, he said, were adopted by mining companies around the world and helped fuel a gold-mining boom in Nevada in the 1990s. Just like those benefits to the mining industry, the negative effects of ending NIOSH research could take years to be borne out, the workers in Spokane warned. 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By the time they get the results back, it might not be meaningful to what they were doing the day that it happened." For years, Miller sought support to develop a portable, real-time silica monitor, similar to the gas monitors commonly worn by coal miners. He finally secured funding soon before he retired, and hired an engineer to continue the work. The project had made good progress, Miller said, but that work is "man-on-the-moon kind of research" that the mining industry won't fund on its own. "The private sector is dollar-driven," he said. "There's no way they're going to do it unless they absolutely know it's going to make money for them. Normally and historically, they're not motivated to do it." The work of preventing diseases like silicosis also falls on the public sector, Miller said, because the worst symptoms often don't emerge until years after a worker retires. While people can die from silicosis — 12,900 do each year, a 2019 study found — it more commonly causes disability and makes affected people more susceptive to other diseases, like tuberculosis. "They usually just have a horrible life and maybe die early, so it's not a real problem for the operator, for the mining guy," Miller said. "He's not going to see the ugliness of it. That's going to be when they're my age, and they're having trouble breathing, and they end up dying 10 years earlier than they otherwise would have. By then, they're long gone from where they worked, and there's no responsibility tied to the people who put them through that." Orion Donovan Smith's work is funded in part by members of the Spokane community via the Community Journalism and Civic Engagement Fund. This story can be republished by other organizations for free under a Creative Commons license. For more information on this, please contact our newspaper's managing editor.
Yahoo
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