EXCLUSIVE: Markwayne Mullin on Mass Deportations
Trump's nominee for Homeland Security secretary's maverick, plainspoken style could diverge in key ways with the xenophobic hellscape championed by Stephen Miller in the White House.
WASHINGTON — The United States Senate sent Markwayne Mullin’s nomination to run the Department of Homeland Security to the floor Tuesday, handing the former Oklahoma plumber the chance to become the most powerful immigration enforcer in the country — but only if he can first get past the man he once told, to his face, that he understood why a neighbor beat him up.
That man is Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky. He chairs the Senate Homeland Security Committee. He controls the hearing room. He controls the clock. And Mullin called him “a freaking snake.”
The Man Who Says What He Thinks
This is Washington, where the past has a way of walking through the door right when you need it to stay outside.
Mullin, R-Okla., has never been a man who chose his words carefully when plain ones were available. That much was clear on December 4th, 2024, the day I first caught up with him just outside freshman Senate orientation. It was my first interview of seven interviews with Markwayne Mullin about immigration policy over the last two years.
At the time, he was still finding the hallways. He talked like a man who hadn’t yet learned that everything in the Capitol echoes. He talked about the military and the limits of deportations. He said what he thought. On whether troops should go door-to-door rounding up migrants, he didn’t reach for talking points. He reached for common sense.
“As far as them going door-to-door, I don’t think they can do that,” he told me. “There’s some legal issues that’ll be there.”
That is not Stephen Miller talking. Miller, the architect of every hard edge in Trump’s immigration agenda, has pushed the military as a blunt instrument, no asterisks. Mullin was already drawing lines.