Donald Trump’s immigration offensive will have a new face. The U.S. president announced Thursday that he has dismissed Kristi Noem from her post as secretary of Homeland Security. The Republican stated that Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma will take over the position at the head of the Department of Homeland Security starting March 31. The dismissal of the official — the first departure from Trump’s Cabinet — comes after the deaths of two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis at the hands of immigration agents and while the department remains unfunded.

Trump announced the decision in a post on his social media platform Truth Social: “I am pleased to announce that the ‌highly respected United States senator from the great state of Oklahoma, Markwayne Mullin, will become the United States Secretary of Homeland Security (DHS), effective March 31, 2026,” he posted.

Trump added that Noem “will be moving to be Special Envoy for The Shield of the Americas, our new Security Initiative in the Western Hemisphere we are announcing on Saturday in Doral, Florida.”

The president then praised Mullin and paid tribute to himself. “Serving 10 years in the United States House of Representatives, and three in the Senate, Markwayne has done a tremendous job representing the wonderful people of Oklahoma, where I won all 77 out of 77 Counties — in 2016, 2020, and 2024!” he said in the post on Truth Social. “A MAGA warrior, and former undefeated professional MMA fighter, Markwayne truly gets along well with people, and knows the wisdom and courage required to advance our America First agenda.”

The message continued: “As the only Native American in the Senate, Markwayne is a fantastic advocate for our incredible Tribal communities. Markwayne will work tirelessly to keep our border secure, stop migrant crime, murderers, and other criminals from illegally entering our country, end the scourge of illegal drugs and, make America safe again. Markwayne will make a spectacular Secretary of Homeland Security.”

The change in leadership at the Department of Homeland Security — the agency that oversees U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the feared enforcement arm of the White House’s immigration campaign — comes after several months of controversy and criticism over Noem’s handling of the role. She has been responsible for enforcing the president’s controversial immigration policy, including his goal of carrying out the “largest deportation in history,” and violent migrant detentions.

Calls for Noem to be removed have been increasing since early January, when ICE agents shot and killed a U.S. citizen in Minneapolis who was protesting the massive immigration operation launched in the state of Minnesota, which involved more than 3,000 agents. The death of Renée Good, a 37-year-old mother and poet, sparked protests across the country. After the incident, Noem defended the actions of the agent involved, as did the rest of the Trump administration, and labeled Good a “domestic terrorist.”

Just two weeks later, agents from the Border Patrol, another immigration agency under the DHS, shot and killed a second U.S. citizen, Alex Pretti, also in Minneapolis. Although both incidents were recorded on video by witnesses in ways that challenged the official account, in Pretti’s case, Noem repeated the same accusation she made against Good and blamed the victim for his death.

Meanwhile, calls for her removal grew, gaining support not only from Democrats but also from some Republicans. According to national media reports, in recent weeks those calls began to come from within the Trump administration itself. According to a report by Politico, Trump’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, was one of People who pressured for Noem to be removed from the post. Trump sent Homan to Minneapolis last month to try to control the crisis that the tensions in the city over the two deaths had created for his government. On February 12, he announced that the immigration operation in Minnesota had concluded.

The president’s patience seems to have finally reached its limit this week. Noem appeared before the Senate on Tuesday. The hearing was controversial — not only because she refused to apologize for calling Good and Pretti “terrorists,” but also because she claimed that the president had approved television ads that spent millions of dollars promoting her nomination as DHS secretary. In statements to the national press, the White House denied that Trump had greenlit the ad campaign; in fact, they said Noem took advantage of her position to prepare for her future political career.

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Digital security, which underpins everything from the most common bank transaction to conversations on messaging platforms, cryptocurrency and critical infrastructure, is based on cryptographic keys: strings of characters encrypted by an algorithm. The difficulty in decrypting them depends on factorization, the decomposition of an algebraic expression into a product; for example, six equals three times two. But this simple operation becomes extraordinarily complex if the given number exceeds a relatively small number of digits, such as 261980999226229.

Back in 1994, Peter Shor, a mathematician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), demonstrated that a quantum computer could efficiently solve the factorization problem. This prediction is now beginning to materialize. “By the end of this decade, a cryptographically relevant quantum computer will be able to break the encryption that underpins our global economy,” warns Anand Oswal, executive vice president of Palo Alto Networks, the company considered the largest provider of cybersecurity services. Experts are urging people to prepare.

For Oswal, the current cryptographic model has been for half a century the “invisible shield that protects everything” because it safeguards digital communication and stored data, the pillars of the internet. But Shor’s prophecy is beginning to materialize with the advancement of quantum computing. “It’s at that tipping point: it’s no longer in the labs, it’s no longer a scientific project; we’re starting to see green shoots and companies that claim to have found a way to perform a stable content computing task,” warns Nikesh Arora, CEO of the same company and host of the Quantum-Safe Summit.

Arora believes there is a window of opportunity of between two and seven years to address the challenge, but urges preparing now: “This is the time to start thinking about how it will impact us and what implications it entails.” According to him, the goal is to transition to a quantum environment without disrupting productivity, technology and infrastructure.

Harvest today, decrypt later

The top executive at Palo Alto insists that the threat is real and “will soon appear before us.” In fact, they have already detected a practice among cybercriminals known as “harvest now, decrypt later,” which involves collecting data now to decrypt it when quantum technology becomes available.

This practice means that information stolen today, if it has an upcoming expiration date, will be irrelevant within two or three years. But if it’s critical or strategic data, quantum computing will decipher it. “We can’t wait until then to act. We must be secure today,” Arora concludes.

The imminent availability of this technology is confirmed by Jerry Chow, head of the Experimental Quantum Computing group at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center. IBM has set a roadmap (and has so far met all planned milestones) to deliver to its clients the first fault-tolerant quantum computer with 200 qubits (the basic unit of quantum information). These systems are expected to be capable of solving problems impossible for classical computing, but also of achieving the qubits necessary to challenge cryptography. “At some point it’s going to happen, and I think the key is to be ahead of it, yes, to prepare for it now,” he admits.

John Martinis, one of the three scientists awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics last year for their research in the quantum universe and a guest at the Quantum-Safe Summit, agrees on the urgency, although he believes there is time to prepare: “I think people need to start worrying a bit. You have time to do this properly, but you don’t have an infinite amount of time. I wouldn’t want quantum computing to be known for breaking the internet. We need to think seriously about replacing our systems.”

How to prepare

Large government cybersecurity agencies and multinational corporations have been preparing for this post-quantum world for years. This is not the case for smaller companies and suppliers to larger entities. Colin Soutar, director of risk advisory at Deloitte, highlights the work of NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology), which has been researching this topic for years. But he points to the need for all entities to start thinking about the new era.

“If you start early, you can see where the vulnerabilities are and begin integrating the alternatives into the planned enterprise upgrades that are already being done. It’s about reinventing the underlying systems, and that involves a lot of work,” he warns.

Soutar advocates starting by establishing the infrastructure and organization, identifying weaknesses, and addressing them. “Don’t try to fix everything at once. You can start making selective updates as you go. It’s an iterative, not sequential, process,” he advises.

To this strategy, Dustin Moody, a mathematician in the Computer Security Division at NIST, adds another recommendation: flexibility and agility to “switch to something else at some point.” “We can never have 100% security. Someone can come up with a new idea, a quantum computer, or an AI that represents a new approach we’ve never considered, and that’s always possible,” he explains.

Moody calls for training, inventorying the elements on which cryptographic systems have been or will be established, as well as their lifespan (“it sounds easy, but it’s very complicated,” he warns), having a specific project and management team, executing the plans, and expanding them. In this regard, he warns about one of the classic problems in cybersecurity: “You’ll have to talk to your suppliers to make sure they’re doing the same.”

“Basically, start that process now and don’t wait because it’s going to be a long and complex transition,” he concludes. “We must make sure we take immediate action, move beyond the brainstorming phase, move quickly, think about where to start, and simply begin. Today we’re talking about taking action,” adds Michael Duffy, U.S. Federal Director of Information Security.

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A failure at Cuba’s main thermoelectric plant has caused a massive blackout affecting two-thirds of the island, the Cuban government confirmed Wednesday. The partial collapse of the island’s National Electric System (SEN) — the second in a month — has left nearly 7 million of the island’s almost 10 million inhabitants without power. The outage is also affecting the capital, Havana.

The government has not yet specified the reasons for the blackout, which is affecting 10 of the country’s 15 provinces, from Camagüey in the east to Pinar del Río in the west. According to state television, an “unforeseen shutdown” of the Antonio Guiteras power plant, the island’s largest generator, caused yet another power outage.

This Wednesday’s outage is the fifth partial blackout — different from a nationwide collapse of the entire electrical system — in less than six months, and the largest so far this year. The incident also reflects the fragile state of the power grid amid U.S. pressure, which has abruptly cut off the supply of Venezuelan crude to Havana and threatened to impose tariffs on any country that provides Cuba with oil, a resource vital for keeping its electrical network running.

But the U.S. oil siege has only worsened a chronic problem on the island. Cuba is suffering a full‑blown energy crisis that has deteriorated significantly over the past year and a half, largely due to the progressive decline in Venezuela’s oil shipments. In fact, over the last 18 months the SEN has suffered five total collapses — meaning the entire country plunged into darkness at the same time because of the inability to generate electricity.

Blackouts are now part of daily life for Cubans, who in recent months have grown accustomed to outages that in some regions can exceed 20 hours a day. These outages, however, are different from SEN collapses. In the first case, they are daily service interruptions caused by the inability of the obsolete Soviet‑era thermoelectric plants to meet demand.

SEN shutdowns, on the other hand, force authorities to carry out a kind of system reboot that, in the worst cases, can take days to fully restore. Before Wednesday’s collapse was confirmed, the state‑owned Unión Eléctrica (UNE) had warned that up to 63% of the country would be left without power at peak demand — late in the afternoon.

That time of day is critical for Cuba’s fragile grid because it coincides with people returning home and turning on air conditioners and fans. Unlike much of the world, in Cuba the highest electricity demand comes from households rather than industry, which has been in terminal decline for decades.

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