Markwayne Mullin defended his ability to lead the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and expressed regrets for comments he made about a US citizen killed by immigration agents at his confirmation hearing on Wednesday, which began on an unusually quarrelsome note when a fellow Republican senator accused him of encouraging violence.
Donald Trump earlier this month nominated Mullin, a first-term Republican senator from Oklahoma, to lead DHS, after the president ousted Kristi Noem amid public blowback against the administration’s aggressive approach to its mass deportation agenda and the deaths of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.
Appearing before the Senate committee on homeland security and governmental affairs, Mullin struck a conciliatory tone and signaled he would seek to avoid some of the mistakes made by Noem, whose publicity-heavy approach to leading the agency reportedly led to the president souring on her leadership.
But he simultaneously cast himself as a defender of the president and his campaign to remove all undocumented immigrants from the country, while pressing Democrats to end their blockade of funding for the department, which has been in a partial shutdown since mid-February.
“My goal in six months is that we’re not in the lead story every single day. My goal is for people to understand we’re out there, we’re protecting them, and we’re working with them,” he said. “But we have to get DHS funded.”
All signs point to a quick confirmation for Mullin, who was elected to the Senate in 2022 after serving five terms in the House of Representatives. Republicans have praised his nomination, and their control of the Senate gives them the numbers to push his appointment through, even if Democrats oppose him.
But the senator seems set to be opposed by the committee’s chair, Rand Paul, who opened the hearing by demanding from Mullin an explanation as to why he called Paul a “freaking snake” and said he “completely understood” why a neighbor had attacked him in 2017.
“Tell the world why you believe I deserve to be assaulted from behind, have six ribs broken and a damaged lung,” Paul said. “Tell me to my face why you think I deserved it, and while you’re at it, explain to the American public why they should trust a man with anger issues to set the proper example for [Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)] and Border Patrol agents.”
Mullin responded by telling Paul, a Kentucky senator known for his libertarian streak, that it “seems like you fight Republicans more than you work with us”, but nonetheless tried to win him over.
“If you’re willing to set it aside, let me earn your respect. Let me earn the job. I won’t fail you,” Mullin said. “I don’t claim to be perfect. I make mistakes, just like anybody else, but mistakes, if you own them, you can learn from them, and you can move ahead. And I’ll make that commitment to you.”
Paul was unsatisfied, accusing Mullin of “a lack of contrition”, then playing a video of him threatening to fight the Teamsters president, Sean O’Brien, during a Senate hearing in 2023 and defending the incident in subsequent interviews.
Mullin replied that O’Brien, who was sitting behind him at the hearing, is now a “close friend” and they “agreed we could have done things different”.
The committee’s top Democratic senator, Gary Peters, seized on several recent statements by Mullin, including that Pretti, an intensive care nurse employed by the US Department of Veterans Affairs, was “a deranged individual that came in to cause maximum damage”.
“Those words probably should have been retracted. I shouldn’t have said that,” Mullin replied. “I went out there too fast. I was responding immediately, without the facts. That’s my fault.”
When Peters asked if he wanted to apologize to Pretti’s family, Mullin declined, saying his death remained under investigation: “We’ll let the investigation go through, and if I’m proven wrong, then I will absolutely.”
Peters also sought details fromMullin, who is not a military veteran, about commentsthat seem to indicate he had seen combat, including when he told Fox News in a recent interview that “war is ugly, it smells bad”.
“Your statements in public interviews and your responses to the committee are, quite frankly, are confusing and they are inconsistent,” Peters said.
Mullin responded by saying that in 2015, he had been asked to “train with a very small contingency and go to a certain area”, though declined to reveal exact details, saying they were classified. That prompted Peters to ask: “Where did you smell war?”
The nominee repeated that the details were classified, prompting Peters to say that he would seek more information about his activities and “if you’re portraying yourself in a truthful way”. As the hearing concluded, Mullin agreed to share some details about the program with senators in a classified setting.
Mullin otherwise cast himself a reliable, if perhaps more diplomatic, ally to the president in his campaign against undocumented immigrants.
When Rick Scott, a Republican senator, asked Mullin how he would deal with “sanctuary cities” that limit their cooperation with immigration enforcement agencies, he said he believed police and mayors in those areas “still love their community, they still love their their cities, they still love this country. Maybe it’s a misunderstanding we can work by.”
But he also backed the president’s campaign to cut funding to such municipalities, despite court rulings against it. “That would be a last option, but at the end of the day, taxpayer dollars have to be used for the right purposes,” Mullin said.
Democrats tried to pin down the extent to which he agreed with Trump’s worldview, and how far Mullin would go for him. “The president would never ask me to do that,” he told senator Maggie Hassan, who questioned Mullin about what he would do if Trump asked him to break the law.
Mullin dodged when Elissa Slotkin asked who won the 2020 election, saying: “Joe Biden was sworn into office. He was the president for the last four years.” He also shrugged off concerns from Andy Kim, a Democratic senator, about the possibility that immigration agents could be deployed to polling stations in upcoming elections, perhaps to intimidate voters.
“I don’t understand what the concern about enforcing immigration at polling places is anyways. Because, honestly, if you’re not a citizen, you shouldn’t be voting anyways. So technically, there shouldn’t be any illegals at the polling spot,” Mullin said.
Under questioning from Richard Blumenthal, another Democratic senator, Mullin rejected the reported practice of ICE agents entering homes with only an administrative warrant, which is approved by a supervisor at the agency, rather than a judge.
“We will not enter a home or place of business without a judicial warrant unless we’re pursuing the individual that runs into a place of business or a house,” Mullin said.
The senator’s nomination collides with a standoff in Congress over funding for the homeland security department, which Democrats have refused to support unless the Trump administration and their Republican allies agree to a host of new guidelines including a ban on officers wearing masks and making random stops of people suspected of being in the country illegally, as well as the creation of a use of force policy.
The sole Democrat thus far to say he will vote for Mullin is Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman, a member of the homeland security committee. “My experience with you has been consistent: kindness and professionalism,” Fetterman told the senator at the hearing.
The committee has scheduled a vote on Mullin’s nomination for Thursday, after which it can be considered by the full Senate.
