Markwayne Mullin

Markwayne Mullin is running the most aggressive immigration enforcement operation in a generation, and nearly every front he has opened is contested. July saw nearly 50,000 ICE arrests, the highest monthly total of the administration, with 66,000 in detention as of July 11. He expanded arrest locations to airports, immigration courts, and ICE check-ins, pressing ICE-TSA manifest sharing to arrest asylum seekers at ticket counters and gates, up to three dozen daily, toward a White House target of 2,000 arrests per day. Airlines are resisting: Southwest staff blocked agents lacking judicial warrants, and the Association of Flight Attendants flagged workplace-safety concerns. MAGA-right figures Steve Bannon and Laura Loomer are criticizing him as too lenient as deportation rates flatline, which DHS dismisses as sowing division.

The border numbers Mullin is broadcasting are striking: 15 consecutive months of zero border releases, July apprehensions at a 30-year low of 9,295, and drug seizures up 26 percent year over year including 1,054 pounds of fentanyl. He credits Trump's leadership for the milestone while Sen. Alex Padilla leads Democrats attacking the $84 billion-plus in civil fines, including $998-per-day overstay charges, as intimidation. He is also fielding Sen. Bernie Moreno's letter pressing for harder tariff-evasion enforcement, with DHS's Trade Fraud Task Force collecting roughly $1 billion in penalties and CBP assessing $2.1 billion-plus in trade penalties this fiscal year.

Mullin is personally fronting the voter-roll-purge campaign. He has threatened state election officials with imprisonment if they refuse to scrub noncitizens from voter rolls, reassigned hundreds of USCIS fraud-detection officers to the effort, and pledged maximum pressure while threatening to withhold taxpayer funds from noncompliant states. He claims 250,000-plus potential noncitizen voters, against the Center for Election Innovation and Research's count of roughly 35 noncitizen-voting cases in 2024. The figures have proved inflated: Nevada's 16,000 narrowed to 185 confirmed, and New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill says fewer than 400 of 6,600 flagged actually voted. Mullin publicly claims Sherrill's office is cooperating; her office disputes that and refuses to release personally identifying voter data. He testified that ICE officers could be deployed to polling places only for a specific threat, a stance aligning with Maine GOP gubernatorial nominee Bobby Charles's push to request federal agents at polling sites, which Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows calls likely illegal.

His relationship with the president is frayed and public. Trump is increasingly frustrated by Mullin's off-message comments, including his suggestion that immigration could fill labor gaps and his remark that some Haitians might stay despite the Supreme Court ruling ending TPS. Trump reversed Mullin's brief pause on ICE vehicle stops after a spate of fatal shootings, issuing the order by social media, and also reversed Mullin's Fourth-of-July decision to call off fireworks for lightning. Trump mandated body cameras for ICE traffic stops, with border czar Tom Homan announcing the directive. A senior official says Trump has no current plan to fire Mullin.

Mullin personally lobbied Trump to nominate Lance Schroyer, a former Oklahoma Highway Patrol officer, as ICE director, but the pick faces a triple squeeze. Sen. Rand Paul, the HSGAC chair, is threatening to delay the confirmation hearing, demanding information on fatal ICE shootings of citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Homan opposes Schroyer for lacking federal immigration experience. Paul-Mullin relations are poisoned by Mullin's past remark calling Paul a "freaking snake." Separately, Mullin personally committed to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott that no wall, fence, or barrier would be built inside Big Bend National Park, and Abbott credits his weekend conversation with Mullin for CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott's August 17 pause on construction. Lawsuits from indigenous and conservation groups and bipartisan opposition from Sen. John Cornyn and Brewster County sheriffs are intensifying, with an Aug. 28 hearing on a possible permanent halt.

On the enforcement-humanitarian fronts, Mullin is managing the end of Haitian TPS for roughly 350,000 people, offering a self-deport-or-we-will-arrest-you ultimatum, though mass removals are bottlenecked by internal ICE confusion and a commercial-flight ban to Port-au-Prince forcing flights through Cap-Haitien. He has personally intervened to release a small number of detained military spouses, but overall policy since April 2025 holds that military service does not exempt noncitizens from enforcement, with the administration detaining 125 veterans and 150-plus immediate family members since January 2025, prompting Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar to call the system a failure for honorable and good Americans. Industry groups including home builders and agriculture are warning that TPS termination for 1.3 million workers is causing labor shortages, even as hardliners attack Mullin for suggesting visa-program changes to plug labor gaps; DHS dismisses the unvetted-illegal-aliens claim as lazy. Mullin publicly dismissed ICE-detained hunger strikers as wanting ethnic food, telling them to go back to their country, while federal courts authorized force-feeding of at least 10 strikers, including an Afghan man force-fed daily for roughly six months, drawing torture and medical-ethics condemnation from human-rights groups and ethicist Matthew Wynia.