Markwayne Returns to Capitol Hill
The new secretary had his first Capitol Hill moment as the boss of DHS. He left senators with more questions than answers. Today, the House gets its turn.
WASHINGTON — Markwayne Mullin walked into a Senate hearing room Tuesday morning as the new secretary of Homeland Security and walked out having refused to say, plainly and on the record, that his department will obey federal court orders.
It was his first appearance before Congress since his confirmation in March. It will not be his last uncomfortable afternoon under the lights — the House Homeland Security Committee picks up where the Senate left off Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. in 310 Cannon.
“Chilling.”
The Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security opened its hearing on the Trump administration’s Fiscal Year 2027 DHS budget request, but the sharpest exchange had little to do with line items.
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., the top Democrat on the subcommittee, asked Mullin a simple question: will DHS comply with court orders even when judges rule that the department is acting illegally?
Mullin wouldn’t say yes.
He offered, instead, that DHS will “never break the Constitution” and “won’t break the law” — formulations careful enough to leave open the door he was being asked to close. When Murphy pressed the point, Mullin turned the attack: if the courts weren’t “politicized,” he said, he could probably answer differently. Some judges, he suggested, use the bench for “political opinion, not just the rule of law.”
Murphy called the answers “chilling.” He warned that an administration that picks which court orders to honor based on whether it likes the judge is laying the groundwork for every future administration to do the same.
The exchange didn’t happen in a vacuum. A Republican-appointed judge had already found, in a Minnesota ruling, that ICE had violated nearly 100 court orders in roughly a month. Mullin’s response to that documented record of non-compliance was to suggest that lower-court rulings get overturned and that this proves politicization — implying, in effect, that DHS should not treat every district court order as binding until the “upper courts” weigh in.
The Money Fight Is Now a Rule-of-Law Fight
The hearing’s official subject — DHS’s FY 2027 budget — never really separated itself from the court-orders fight.
Republicans came ready to align with Trump’s mass-deportation push, rallying around a request for roughly $72 billion in additional ICE and Border Patrol funding over three years, layered on top of approximately $170 billion in immigration enforcement spending already approved in 2025. Mullin pressed the case that Congress, Democrats specifically, had failed to “fund his officers.”
Democrats pressed back in the only logical direction: why appropriate billions more to an agency whose secretary won’t commit to obeying a judge?
Murphy put the equation plainly: the money debate and the rule-of-law question are the same question. You cannot authorize a deportation machine and simultaneously shrug at the judicial limits designed to constrain it.
Newark, the World Cup, and the Art of the Threat
Senators also took up Mullin’s recent threat to pull Customs and Border Protection officers from Newark Liberty International Airport — a move he floated publicly as leverage against what he called “sanctuary city” politicians and as a response to protests outside the Delaney Hall ICE detention facility in New Jersey.
The practical stakes are significant: travel and business groups have warned that reassigning CBP passport-control officers from Newark could cost around $8 billion a year in lost tourist revenue and cause cascading disruptions at a major international hub — with the FIFA World Cup’s U.S. matches beginning in a matter of weeks.
At the hearing, Mullin walked back the threat’s immediacy, saying state and local law enforcement are now cooperating more and the operational pressure has eased. But he defended the underlying posture: DHS, in his telling, is simply reallocating resources to protect ICE staff from protesters.
Democrats framed it differently. If DHS will threaten airports to punish jurisdictions that resist its immigration agenda, and call the courts “politicized” when they rule against it, and describe state health inspectors attempting to visit a detention facility as politically motivated — then the pattern is not enforcement. It’s retaliation dressed up as administration.
What the House Is Watching For
Democratic sources on the House Homeland Security Committee tell Migrant Insider that among the questions members are prepared to put to Mullin Wednesday is a direct one about Jonathan Ross — the ICE agent who shot and killed Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis on January 7.
Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, was shot at close range in her SUV in a residential neighborhood as she attempted to drive away from a group of federal agents conducting door-to-door enforcement operations. Ross — placed on just three days of administrative leave after the shooting, and since transferred to a different state where he continues to work in both an administrative and investigative capacity — has not been charged. The Trump administration moved early to sideline Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension from the investigation, leaving it solely to the FBI, whose probe has proceeded slowly and under a cloud of controversy.
Democratic members want to know: Is Ross still employed by ICE? In what capacity? And when, if ever, will DHS conduct its own internal affairs review — or does the agency intend to run out the clock behind the FBI investigation indefinitely?
The question will force Mullin, who positioned himself Tuesday as a more “subdued” executor of the mass-deportation program than his predecessor Kristi Noem, to account for what accountability inside his agency actually looks like.
Other likely flashpoints in today’s House session: members from New York, New Jersey, and other World Cup host cities pressing for specifics on the Newark threat and whether similar leverage is on the table for Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, or Seattle; close questioning on detention conditions at Delaney Hall, including state health inspectors’ access; and, again, the question Mullin ducked in the Senate — yes or no, will DHS follow court orders?
He had one hearing to answer it cleanly. He chose not to. He gets another chance today.
The hearing begins at 10 a.m. Eastern in 310 Cannon House Office Building and will be livestreamed on C-SPAN.
He sucks and is just as horrible as those of us from Oklahoma told you he would be. Another swinging dick butt kisser. Already heard he’s flying his family around in the Kristie Nome jet. Way to be professional Mullins. Redneck idiot. You’ve done nothing to stop ice violence either you spineless POS!
So typical of what the rethuglicans dredge up from the bottom of the stagnant swamp.