For months, many of New Jersey’s Democratic officeholders have been calling for Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to resign. Today, after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed a U.S. citizen in Minneapolis, one New Jersey congressional candidate went further: Noem should be impeached.
Brian Varela, one of eight Democrats seeking to defeat Rep. Tom Kean Jr. (R-Westfield) in the highly competitive 7th congressional district, said that after seeing Noem “deliberately mislead the American people and smear the victim” in the wake of the shooting, he believes Congress needs to take action.
“Leaders should not be impeached for acts of a single agent, but Noem’s lies yesterday fit a disturbing and well-documented pattern,” Varela said today in a statement. “Congress has both the moral and constitutional obligation to act to protect American citizens from the dangers of ICE under Kristi Noem’s leadership.”
The Minneapolis shooting, which Noem and other Trump administration officials have defended as an act of self-defense by the ICE agent, has prompted a furious response from Democrats; one Illinois congresswoman, Robin Kelly, has said she’ll put forward articles of impeachment. When that resolution is officially introduced, some of New Jersey’s most progressive House members, hailing from the state’s bluest congressional districts, may sign on.
Varela, though, stands out as a Democrat from a district that is definitively not among the state’s bluest. Donald Trump narrowly carried the 7th district in 2024, prompting many of the Democrats running against Kean to stick to more moderate campaign messaging; Varela, in contrast, has run as much more of an unabashed progressive, and his call for Noem’s impeachment is only the latest example.
Removing someone from office via impeachment requires a two-thirds majority in the Senate, a high bar that has not been cleared in any recent impeachment proceeding. But in the House, impeachment resolutions only need a simple majority to pass, meaning that if Democrats retake control this November, Varela’s demand could become a realistic possibility.
That’s precisely what happened in 2024, when the GOP-led House voted to impeach Biden-era DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas (an effort that promptly died in the Senate). Kean supported the impeachment resolution alongside most of his fellow Republicans, saying that Mayorkas’s actions at the southern border were a “willful and systemic refusal to comply with federal law and a clear breach of public trust.”
