Saturday Night Live’s cold open on March 7 took aim at the recently ousted Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem by mocking her testimony to lawmakers, her new role in President Trump’s administration and past controversies.
Comedian Ashley Padilla, who played Noem, delivered a mock farewell speech at a fictional press briefing to poke fun at the secretary’s removal from DHS and her reassignment as special envoy to the Shield of the Americas initiative.
“I didn’t get fired. I self-deported,” Padilla’s Noem quipped, before adding, “You miss 100% of the dogs you don’t shoot.”
The latter was a reference to Noem’s widely criticized 2024 book revelation that she shot her family’s dog, Cricket, after the wirehaired pointer ruined a pheasant hunt by chasing birds and then attacked a neighbor’s chickens.
Noem was removed from her DHS post on March 5. Trump said she “has served us well,” citing her “spectacular results” on the border, and announced she would move to a new role as special envoy for the Shield of the Americas, a new security initiative the administration plans to unveil. Noem gave a speech in Nashville shortly after the announcement and later posted on X, thanking Trump and touting “historic accomplishments” at DHS.
The episode, hosted by Ryan Gosling, also featured Weekend Update co-anchor Colin Jost in his recurring role as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Jost’s Hegseth held a mock press conference riffing on the ongoing U.S. military operations targeting Iran, deflecting questions about whether the conflict constituted a war.
“This isn’t a war,” the sketch’s Hegseth declared. “It’s a situationship. We’re just gonna hook up, see where it goes.” When pressed on whether there would be boots on the ground, he quipped: “We don’t know what we’re doing — and that’s the whole point. If we don’t know, Iran definitely doesn’t know.”
Host and co-anchor Michael Che also riffed on Noem’s ouster at the Weekend Update desk. Che joked that Noem had been “singled out as the worst member of Trump’s cabinet — that’s like someone coming up to you at a party and saying, We think you should leave, you’re making Diddy uncomfortable.” Che quipped that Trump’s new Shield of the Americas envoy role for Noem was “a brand-new department, located on a farm upstate.”
Saturday Night Live airs on NBC.