Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin on Tuesday said his department is “drawing up” plans to halt customs and immigration processing at international airports in “sanctuary cities” that are defying enforcement of President Donald Trump’s immigration agenda.
Mullin joined Fox News after protests Monday outside Delaney Hall, a privately run immigrant detention center in Newark, where locals clashed with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents — whose deployed pepper-spray balls injured Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.).
“I visited with the White House today, Sean, and I said, you know, if they’re going to not allow us to go out and arrest the worst of the worst, and then when we call for assistance at the facilities, that street, it belongs to the city,” Mullin told host Sean Hannity.
The MAGA official continued, “If it belonged to us, we would take care of it, but it belongs to the city, and they’re barricading our employees from coming in and out of the facility. Then, Why are we processing international flights into the airport there?”
Kim and other Democratic lawmakers visited Delaney Hall over the weekend amid reports of hunger strikes and inhumane conditions inside, which prompted protests on Monday that Kim said he tried to defuse when ICE agents deployed pepper spray and made several arrests.
Mullin claimed Tuesday that DHS requests for assistance from local police were ignored.
He told Hannity his department is “currently drawing up plans to say, listen, in these sanctuary cities where the local, radical left Democrats aren’t allowing us to do our job and enforce federal laws, then we shouldn’t be processing international flights into their cities either.”
The Trump official has claimed there is “NO hunger strike” and “no subprime conditions” at Delaney, and told Hannity that Homeland Security is not responsible for processing customs or immigration at cities whose residents “don’t want us to enforce immigration.”
Mullin and his department claim conditions at immigrant detention facilities like Delaney Hall are safe and humane, yet ICE detainees appear to be dying by suicide at an “alarming” rate, according to an investigation by The Associated Press.
Mullin provided understaffed airports during the government shutdown with ICE agents while threatening to restrict customs processing in jurisdictions refusing to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement, a threat now affecting travel for the 2026 World Cup.
The quadrennial soccer event is returning to the U.S. this summer for the first time since 1994. Trump’s immigration agenda and its measures of enforcement are reportedly dissuading potential visitors from traveling to America for fear of dangerous reprisal.
“You see the ICE people going around and just pulling people from the streets just because they look foreign, and you don’t get the feeling that anybody would protect me, you know?” Steve Schwarzbach, a German soccer fan who attended previous World Cups, told CNN.
Kim on Saturday said he and his colleague spoke to “dozens, if not a hundred or more” Delaney Hall detainees, who are being fed “disgusting food” and aren’t getting medical treatment “they need,” including a pregnant woman, noting he spoke directly to hunger strike participants.
Trump border czar Tom Homan on Tuesday told Fox News host Laura Ingraham that hunger strikes “never work” — and added that “if it gets bad enough and the prisoners feel like they’re putting themselves in extreme danger, medical danger, then we’ll force-feed them.”