Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem took a shot at Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz for how he handled the 2020 riots in his state, claiming that the Trump administration wouldn’t let history repeat itself in Los Angeles amid immigration protests. 

Noem, who previously served as governor of South Dakota, defended the Trump administration’s decision to deploy thousands of National Guard troops and hundreds of Marines to address the protests in Los Angeles, using Minnesota as an example of what happens when a ‘bad governor’ is in charge. 

‘I was a governor of a neighboring state to Tim Walz and watched him let his city burn,’ Noem told reporters Tuesday. ‘And the president and I have talked about this in the past, and he was not going to let that happen to another city and to another community where a bad governor made a bad decision.’ 

Walz was first elected governor of Minnesota in 2019, leading the state as protests broke out after the death of Black man George Floyd at the hands of a White police officer in 2020. While Walz has said he takes the blame for a delayed response activating the National Guard in his state, he has also said he is proud of how Minnesota reacted. 

‘I’m proud of Minnesota’s response. I’m proud of Minnesota’s first responders who were out there, from firefighters to police to the National Guard to citizens that were out there,’ Walz said in a 2022 gubernatorial debate. 

Walz’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital. 

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is dispatching a total of 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines to Los Angeles after protests broke out Friday stemming from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests in the city. 

President Donald Trump has gone head-to-head with California’s governor, Democrat Gavin Newsom, over the activation of the troops. While Trump has argued the National Guard troops are necessary to prevent destruction in Los Angeles, Newsom said most of the troops ‘are sitting, unused, in federal buildings without orders.’ 

Additionally, Newsom argued that the move violates state sovereignty because state governors typically oversee National Guard troops. However, Trump invoked a law to place the troops under federal command to bypass Newsom. 

‘This isn’t about public safety,’ Newsom said in a post on X on Monday. ‘It’s about stroking a dangerous President’s ego.’

The Associated Press contributed to this report. 

The majority of House Democrats voted in favor of allowing non-citizens to participate in Washington, D.C. elections on Tuesday.

The House of Representatives passed a bill led by Rep. August Pfluger, R-Texas, to prohibit non-U.S. citizens from voting in elections in the nation’s capital.

It passed 266 to 148, with 56 Democrats joining Republicans in passing the measure. One Democrat voted ‘present,’ while 148 voted against the bill.

‘I believe strongly in not having federal overreach, but we have jurisdiction, Congress has jurisdiction over Washington, District of Columbia…and we don’t like to utilize our jurisdiction and our authority, but in this case, they’ve gone too far,’ Pfluger told Fox News Digital in an interview before the vote.

D.C.’s progressive city council passed the Local Resident Voting Rights Amendment Act in 2022, granting non-U.S. citizens the ability to vote in local elections if they’ve lived in the district for at least 30 days.

Noncitizens can also hold local elected office in the D.C. government.

The local measure has been a frequent target of GOP attacks, with Republican national security hawks raising alarms about the possibility of hostile foreign agents participating in D.C. elections.

But progressive Democrats like Rep. Maxwell Frost, D-Fla., who spoke out against the bill on Tuesday afternoon, have dismissed that as an implausible scenario. 

‘Republicans claim that Congress has a constitutional duty to legislate on local D.C. matters, but this is historically and legally incorrect. Republicans legislate on local D.C. matters only when they think they can score political points, such as by demonizing immigrants,’ Frost said during debate on the House floor.

‘They only bring it up to the floor when they think they can score political points, taking away the democratic rights of people here in D.C. and home rule.’

Frost also argued that it was ‘highly unlikely’ foreign officials would vote in those elections, claiming they would have to ‘renounce their right to vote in their home country’ and because ‘D.C. has no authority in federal matters.’

But Pfluger, who spoke with Fox News Digital before the vote, was optimistic that it would get at least some Democratic support.

He noted that 52 Democrats voted for the bill when it passed the House in the previous Congress. It was never taken up in the formerly Democrat-controlled Senate, however.

‘It’s hard to go back to your district as a Democrat and say, yeah, I want foreign agents to be able to vote in our elections – ‘Oh yeah, it’s not federal elections,’ some may say. But it has an impact on the way the city is run,’ Pfluger said.

‘This could be Russian embassy personnel, they could be Chinese embassy personnel – a number of folks. It’s just wrong. It goes against the fabric of our society,’ he added.

Another bill receiving a vote on Tuesday is legislation that would grant D.C. police the ability to negotiate punishments via collective bargaining, and would help shield the capital’s police force from at least some liability by installing a statute of limitations against the Metropolitan Police Department. 

That legislation was introduced by New York Republican Rep. Andrew Garbarino.

Several Democratic senators, including one who remains the preacher at Martin Luther King Jr.’s church, joined several clergy members for a vigil in opposition to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on the Capitol steps Tuesday.

‘Clergy and leaders in robes, collars and religious vestments will offer prayers, sing songs, read scripture and testify to the Gospel, providing a moral reckoning at this critical moment in history,’ read an advisory announcing the vigil obtained by Fox News Digital.

Rev. Jim Wallis, who advised the Obama administration on faith and neighborhood partnerships, told the crowd they ‘come today in spiritual procession – singing, reading Scripture and coming for a vigil on the Senate steps.’

‘Some say that we should keep faith out of politics – we’re saying while the Bible doesn’t give us detailed legislation, it tells us who to care for,’ Wallis went on. ‘We don’t want to let Jesus Christ be left outside the Senate chamber for this vote.’

Wallis called Republicans’ budget a ‘big bad bill’ that will purportedly ‘take 60 million [people] off of health care.’

Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., cited Luke 10, recalling the passage where a lawyer – ‘and it’s always a lawyer causing trouble,’ he quipped – asks Jesus who qualifies as a neighbor and who one ought to care for.

Coons claimed the GOP bill ‘literally takes the food from the mouths of hungry children to pass an enormous tax cut for the very wealthiest [and] is the definition of an immoral bill before this Congress.’

Later, Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga. – reverend of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta – said the vigil felt like ‘déjà vu.’

Warnock recounted protesting via prayer and singing in the Capitol rotunda in 2017 – alongside former North Carolina NAACP president William Barber II – and said he ‘drew the short straw’ when he, but not Barber, was arrested.

‘As I stood there, I said then what I want to say today: That a budget is not just a fiscal document, it’s a moral document.’

‘Show me your budget and I’ll show you who you think matters and who does not – who you think is dispensable. Right. And we stood there in 2017 making the same point,’ he said, crediting the Capitol Police for arresting them in a professional manner. Warnock recounted that when he was warned of being arrested, he said he had ‘already been arrested.’

‘My mind and my imagination and my heart had been arrested by the heartbeat of children who should not lose their food and who should not lose healthcare in order to give wealthy people a tax cut,’ he said, suggesting the same was true with Republicans’ latest budget bill.

‘Here I am eight years later, having transformed my agitation into legislation.’

‘I’m here today because I still know how to agitate – I still know how to protest. I’m not a senator who used to be a pastor. I’m a pastor in the Senate.’

Expect the House of Representatives to make ‘technical corrections’ to President Donald Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill’ Wednesday.

But if you blink, you might miss it.

Senate Republicans are now in the middle of the ‘Byrd Bath’ with Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough. This is a process, named after late Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., to exclude provisions from budget reconciliation packages that don’t comport with special Senate budget rules. 

The Senate must use this special process to avoid a filibuster.

Some items in the House bill don’t fit into the bill under those special budget rules. So, they are tossing them out. But the House must essentially alter the bill and send it back to the Senate.

The House will embed those changes into a ‘rule’ Wednesday to tee up the spending cancellations bill to trim money for USAID and public broadcasting for debate and a vote on Friday.

So, the ‘altered’ bill, with the technical corrections, goes back to the Senate.

‘I think it’s going to be nothing that was unexpected. I don’t think it’s going to be a problem,’ House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said.

‘I’m trying to defend my product that was sent over there. As you all know, it took a long time to get that balance.’