{"id":1486,"date":"2026-07-21T15:43:49","date_gmt":"2026-07-21T15:43:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1486"},"modified":"2026-07-21T15:43:49","modified_gmt":"2026-07-21T15:43:49","slug":"the-secretary-of-homeland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1486","title":{"rendered":"The Secretary of Homeland"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The most important policy decision<\/span> made by Markwayne Mullin in his short tenure atop the Department of Homeland Security stood for barely a day. ICE officers had just killed two people: a Mexican construction worker with three American sons in Texas, and a Colombian delivery driver whose 3-year-old daughter saw him lying dead in the street in Maine. In each case, the officers had been looking for men other than the ones they killed. DHS officials claimed that the officers had fired defensively during chaotic vehicle stops, but they offered no body-camera footage to back those claims. After phone calls with Maine\u2019s senators, including Susan Collins, the secretary ordered an emergency halt to most traffic stops. But the decision surprised many in the White House, including President Trump, who reversed the order in a social-media post the next morning. Mullin wasn\u2019t fired, but his authority was undercut, to the delight of the online MAGA mob that had been hammering the former Oklahoma senator as a wuss.<\/p>\n

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Mullin declared on social media that he and Trump were \u201con the same page\u201d on ICE enforcement tactics and priorities. But for a secretary whose views on the department he leads are still vague, the phrasing posed a question: What page are they on, exactly?<\/p>\n

Trump seeks the removal of millions of immigrants from U.S. cities and communities, and Mullin was brought in to do that more quietly and cheerfully than his predecessor. Kristi Noem was ousted after the killings in January of two U.S. citizens protesting ICE in Minneapolis. But Mullin, who started in March, is already being squeezed by the same forces that led to her removal. Trump\u2019s supporters want to see the record-breaking deportation campaign that Trump promised them. But when DHS dials up the intensity of ICE enforcement, the broader public recoils from the violence it generates.<\/p>\n

Mullin, who dropped out of college to run his father\u2019s plumbing business in eastern Oklahoma, took an unusual path to leading the most important domestic-policy initiative of Trump\u2019s second term. He came to the job as somewhat of a blank slate, lacking both the ideological zeal of Stephen Miller, Trump\u2019s immigration-policy chief, and the icy resolve of Noem, who pressed Trump\u2019s mass-deportation campaign with a ruthless determination.<\/p>\n

Mullin was an improbable choice in other ways. He is not from a border state and did not arrive with deep knowledge of immigration policy or a background in counterterrorism. He never served in the military or in law enforcement, and he didn\u2019t work on the congressional committees that directly oversee DHS and immigration. A former wrestler and mixed-martial-arts fighter, Mullin was known for organizing vigorous bipartisan workout sessions on the Hill, where he served for a decade in the House and for three years in the Senate. What was never in doubt were Mullin\u2019s qualifications as a combatant for Trump. The president liked that Mullin was someone, he said, who \u201ctruly gets along well with people\u201d but is also a \u201cMAGA Warrior,\u201d ready to brawl in congressional hearings and cable-news hits on the president\u2019s behalf.<\/p>\n

Mullin spent his career running businesses he owns, rarely having to follow a chain of command. Some of the DHS officials I\u2019ve spoken with, who are generally supportive of Mullin, say that he\u2019s not used to getting permission from superiors and lacks the experience on immigration issues to understand the implications of policy decisions such as halting vehicle stops. \u201cHe wasn\u2019t brought in because of his command of CBP and ICE issues,\u201d one DHS official told me. \u201cHe was brought in to restore normalcy.\u201d But normalcy is not what MAGA hard-liners want to see. When Mullin demonstrates the slightest unease with the human cost of enforcement operations, right-wing critics pounce, taunting him as \u201cMarkwayne Muslim\u201d and the \u201cKung Fu Plumber.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mullin does bring to DHS the one quality valued above any other in this administration: an imperturbable loyalty to Trump. The question hanging over him, as the pressure to ramp up deportations collides with the messy realities of carrying them out, is whether that loyalty has any limit.<\/p>\n

Created in the aftermath <\/span>of the September 11 attack, the Department of Homeland Security is a buttoned-up place with leaders who generally try to project steady resolve. Mullin brings more emotion to the job. Despite his tough-guy image, he struggles to hold back tears when he talks about his family. He got choked up during his confirmation hearing in March talking about his father\u2019s work ethic and the devotion of his wife, Christie, whom he \u201cfell in love with in third grade.\u201d His eyes welled up during a budget hearing last month when he talked about sex-trafficking victims and confronting \u201cevil in the world.\u201d And he breaks down when talking about the brain injury his son survived in 2020, a story that also explains his personal devotion to Trump.<\/p>\n

Mullin\u2019s son Jim was 15 years old when he took a blow to the head during a wrestling match and collapsed. The boy\u2019s pulse dropped, and his lips turned blue. When Jim woke up in the hospital 26 hours later, he didn\u2019t recognize his parents and had the motor skills of a toddler. \u201cHe\u2019s a totally different kid,\u201d Mullin later recalled. \u201cWe almost lost him.\u201d But when the teenager was asked who the president was, his father says, he knew. Trump was delighted when he heard this. The president offered his plane to fly Jim to a rehab clinic in California and showed deep concern for the boy\u2019s condition, visiting him and calling every week to check on his \u201cbuddy\u201d for a year and a half. It was Trump\u2019s affection, Mullin said, that helped Jim reclaim his memories and stay motivated. \u201cWe were acquaintances before that,\u201d Mullin told a Senate panel earlier this year. \u201cWe\u2019ve been friends ever since.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mullin declared that he would follow Trump \u201cinto any situation\u201d\u2014and he has. Not long after Jim\u2019s injury, Mullin joined the president in falsely claiming that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen, a position he stuck to even after he directly confronted rioters as they tried to break into the House chamber on January 6. As a senator, Mullin championed the president\u2019s massive spending bill last year, even though he\u2019d first run for office as a fiscal hawk. And in March, when Trump asked Mullin to replace the scandal-ridden Noem at DHS, Mullin gave up what could have been a long congressional career for a job often described as one of the worst in Washington: a political hot seat with grave security responsibilities, atop a bureaucratic mash-up of 22 agencies and subagencies, and 275,000 employees. Mullin, who said he was surprised by Trump\u2019s request, didn\u2019t think twice.\u201cIt\u2019s hard to say no to someone you have that kind of connection with,\u201d Jason Owens, a former Border Patrol chief who is also Mullin\u2019s cousin, told me.<\/p>\n

The department has become far more partisan under Trump, and Mullin has done nothing to indicate that he\u2019s likely to impose boundaries. Two days after the public reversal on vehicle stops, Mullin held a media briefing next door to the White House to push Trump\u2019s favorite issue, echoing thin claims about election fraud while issuing threats\u2014idle ones, legal experts say\u2014to state officials who refuse to hand over voter data. When a reporter asked Mullin whether Trump had known in advance about the order halting ICE vehicle stops, Mullin dissembled, insisting that there was \u201cno daylight\u201d between them. \u201cI\u2019ve turned down the temperature of the stove, to try to get it correct, without boiling over,\u201d Mullin said, touting record numbers of immigration arrests in recent weeks. Asked to clarify what he meant by \u201ctemperature,\u201d Mullin said that he wanted less intense media coverage, not less aggressive ICE operations. \u201cWe\u2019re turning up the heat on the streets,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Mullin is 48, compact and powerful, with a thick neck and tight-fitting suits that look as if they\u2019re about to burst. His front teeth are fake, he says; the original ones were knocked out at a rodeo by a \u201chorn to the mouth.\u201d Bull riding, wrestling, and MMA fighting all involve short, performative bursts of action, not unlike partisan combat. Mullin shares his boss\u2019s urge to lunge at any slight but also to befriend former enemies if they decide to embrace him. Sean O\u2019Brien\u2014the burly Teamsters boss whom Mullin told to \u201cstand your butt up\u201d and fight him during a 2023 Senate hearing\u2014ended up endorsing Mullin\u2019s nomination to lead DHS after the president encouraged the two to make peace. During the confirmation hearing, O\u2019Brien sat just over his shoulder, next to Mullin\u2019s wife, Christie.<\/p>\n

Miller remains the driving force behind Trump\u2019s immigration agenda, even though his influence over day-to-day DHS operations has diminished somewhat since the Minneapolis shootings. Mullin, like Miller, delights in hyperbolic attacks on Democrats, but the two men are in many ways stylistic opposites: Mullin is earnest and unpretentious; emotional, not cerebral. It\u2019s almost impossible to imagine Miller crying in public.<\/p>\n

Mullin has been a vocal supporter of ICE officers and Trump\u2019s border wall, but he has also spoken sympathetically about hard-working immigrants who stay out of trouble, sounding more like a conventional pro-business Republican than a closed-borders ideologue. Some Republicans facing difficult midterm races hoped that Mullin would defuse some of the backlash to Trump\u2019s heavy-handed tactics, while hard-liners have been wary of Mullin\u2019s statements in support of legal immigration (they want none) and his emphasis on deporting dangerous criminals (they want more deportations than that).<\/p>\n

Others have even loftier dreams for Mullin. I was surprised when a conservative former DHS official told me that he expected Trump to seek a major immigration compromise before the end of his term, as a legacy-building project and a bid to bring Latino voters back to the Republican Party. Mullin, who has impeccable MAGA credentials and improbably friendly relations with key Democrats, would be the ideal person to make such a deal, he told me.<\/p>\n

Mullin\u2019s desire to keep DHS out of the headlines was wishful thinking, if not naive. After a few weeks on the job, he threatened to curb international flights to U.S. airports that serve \u201csanctuary\u201d jurisdictions that won\u2019t help ICE, then backed off that idea after it was panned by business groups, members of both parties, and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. Although there are no longer sweeping crackdowns on major cities for the time being, ICE arrests are ramping up again to roughly 2,000 a day nationwide, nearly double the pace since spring.<\/p>\n

Mullin has been trying to turn temperatures down in other ways. He has eased off warrantless searches and enforcement around sensitive locations such as courthouses and schools. ICE recruits are no longer being fast-tracked through the training academy, and Mullin has halted plans to house tens of thousands of detainees in retrofitted warehouses. But Mullin gets prickly\u00a0 when Democrats claim a victory that could make him look weak. When New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat, boasted on social media last month that DHS had \u201cbacked down\u201d from its plan to open an ICE jail in her state, Mullin reversed course. \u201cDHS will NEVER back down,\u201d he declared. \u201cWe will be keeping this site for a detention center.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mullin says that his personal mantra <\/span>is \u201cLove the people, love the call,\u201d and he has applied that as a management approach at DHS. Employee morale suffered during Noem\u2019s tenure, and Mullin has devoted time to rallying the workforce, earning the nickname \u201cMAGA Mayorkas.\u201d It\u2019s meant as a favorable comparison to Joe Biden\u2019s DHS secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, who was known within DHS for being kind to his staff even though Republicans treated him like the boogeyman.<\/p>\n

In Mullin\u2019s office at DHS headquarters, located in the former Saint Elizabeths psychiatric-hospital complex in Southeast Washington, the secretary carries around a little squishy pink ball. Since middle school, he has used it as a stress-relief device and fidget tool\u2014he calls it his \u201cpacifier\u201d\u2014and he\u2019ll bounce it to center himself when he wants to make a point. He grew up with a \u201cbad speech impediment,\u201d he says, and the alphabet soup of agencies and subagencies at DHS tripped him up at first. Mullin has since learned to carefully enunciate initialisms such as \u201cCBP\u201d in the correct order but has a curious habit of referring to DHS simply as \u201cHomeland,\u201d like the TV show, and his role as the \u201csecretary of Homeland.\u201d It makes the job sound warmer\u2014like heartland<\/em>\u2014while also subtly reinforcing the view, popular with Trump appointees at DHS, that the nation\u2019s top immigration-enforcement official should be a kind of cultural and demographic policeman as well as a real one.<\/p>\n

Mullin is only the second Native American to lead a Cabinet agency, but for much of his political career, he treated his Cherokee identity as more of a biographical footnote than a central feature. \u201cI never knew I was special for being Cherokee until I came to D.C.,\u201d Mullin said during a Senate hearing last year. \u201cWhere I\u2019m from, everybody\u2019s Indian, or wants to be.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Democrats pressed Mullin last month during a DHS budget hearing to address questions about discrimination and racial profiling by immigration-enforcement officers, Mullin used his Cherokee identity as a shield. Representative Lou Correa of California, a Democrat, asked Mullin whether his constituents needed to carry their U.S. passport to protect themselves from ICE. \u201cI\u2019m from Indian Country, and we got a lot of brown people around there too,\u201d Mullin fired back. After Representative Al Green of Texas, another Democrat, accused Mullin of defending racism, Mullin interrupted: \u201cAre you calling me racist?\u201d Green, incensed, shouted at him to \u201cshut up,\u201d but Mullin kept on swinging. \u201cNo one will call me a racist. I\u2019m Cherokee,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Mullin flies home to his family in Oklahoma most weekends on the same executive jet that Noem controversially purchased for the department, one of several missteps that led to her ouster. DHS told me that Mullin pays for his trips, but the department did not respond to follow-up questions about how his share of the cost is calculated. The Mullins\u2014who married when they were teenagers\u2014live in a large house in the Tulsa suburb of Bixby, where they moved a few years ago when their kids\u2019 beloved wrestling coach took a job there. Mullin\u2019s convoy of black SUVs has been spotted rolling around Bixby when he\u2019s home. The couple have six children, three of whom are adopted. \u201cI am proud to be pro-life,\u201d Mullin has said of his large family.<\/p>\n

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I went to northeast Oklahoma, where Mullin grew up, to gain a better understanding of his origins and his divided life between home and Washington, D.C. Although much of the state is flat, and rich in oil and gas, the 14 counties that compose the Cherokee Nation are a gentle landscape of forests, rivers, and cattle pastures in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains.<\/p>\n

Mullin was dragged on social media after asserting his Cherokee identity during the hearing, because he appears white. He is one of more than 460,000 enrolled members of the country\u2019s largest federally recognized tribe. Eligibility is based on genealogical lineage, not on physical appearance or a minimum \u201cblood quantum.\u201d Members must trace direct lineage to a Cherokee ancestor inscribed in the Dawes Rolls, a federal registry of tribal members in Oklahoma kept from 1898 to 1914. Chuck Hoskin Jr., the chief of the Cherokee Nation, told me that he estimates that the majority of enrolled members have one-eighth or less Cherokee DNA. People who see Mullin \u201cmay say, \u2018That doesn\u2019t fit my perception of what a Native American should be,\u2019\u201d Hoskin said. \u201cBut it\u2019s very much statistically who we are.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other Cherokee members I met described their tribal heritage as Mullin does, as a source of pride but not necessarily the defining feature of their life. It\u2019s also a source of social-welfare benefits. Cherokee identity has long been bound up in the tribe\u2019s relationship to the federal government; enrollments surged during the creation of the Dawes Rolls, Julie L. Reed, a historian at the University of Tulsa, told me. In the mid-20th century, more white-passing members were eager to assimilate and downplay their heritage. Things have come full circle in recent decades, Reed said, the result of government benefits, federal-contracting advantages, and a resurgent pride in Cherokee identity. \u201cPeople whose families had distanced themselves from the Cherokee Nation for all sorts of reasons over the course of the 20th century found their way back once the Nation really started to have real economic, political, and social impacts on the surrounding area,\u201d Reed said.<\/p>\n

The Cherokee Nation, whose chief is an elected official, is an economic juggernaut with annual revenues of more than $3 billion from casinos, federal contracts, and an array of tribe-owned businesses. One of the region\u2019s largest employers, the Nation has invested more than $1.2 billion into capital projects in recent years, according to Hoskin. Tahlequah, the Cherokee capital, is a thriving midsize town, with chain stores along the highways and a welcoming, well-maintained historic district. There\u2019s a new medical complex, along with new community centers, senior care, playgrounds, and schools, some offering Cherokee-language immersion programs.<\/p>\n

Oklahoma was solidly Democratic for decades after it became the 46th state, in 1907, especially after the New Deal brought federal jobs and benefits to counties that were among the nation\u2019s poorest. Benny Denton, an 85-year-old rancher who lives near the Mullin-family homestead, told me that when he was growing up, \u201cI didn\u2019t know of anybody who actually starved to death. But there wasn\u2019t a rabbit in the field or a fish in the river.\u201d The Cherokee Nation, whose government is nonpartisan, has spent the past several decades building the kind of cradle-to-grave welfare state once contemplated in the New Deal, even as Democrats have virtually disappeared from Oklahoma public office.<\/p>\n

The ranch where Mullin grew up<\/span> is less than a mile from the Arkansas state line, outside the tiny town of Westville, at the end of a narrow road winding past battered houses and trailers. A tall metal fence surrounds the 1,600-acre property, its gates engraved with the large M<\/em> of the family logo. Mullin is the youngest of seven children, and friends and neighbors of the family spoke highly of his parents as hardworking, devout, and down-to-earth. Mullin\u2019s father has a reputation for being somewhat stern, and he disciplined his kids with a belt; his mother is known for being warm, chatty, and a prodigious baker of cookies. Mullin was named after her brothers, Mark and Wayne. John Garrett, the 84-year-old chief justice of the Cherokee Nation Supreme Court, has known the family for decades and remembers Mullin accompanying his father to plumbing calls as a teenager. He was ambitious, a \u201cgo-getter,\u201d Garrett told me. \u201cHe just had a lot of energy.\u201d<\/p>\n

The state\u2019s shift to the Republican Party happened during those teen years, and the party\u2019s attacks on \u201cbig government\u201d found traction in a region with a fraught relationship to federal agencies that many Cherokee both depended on and resented. Mullin\u2019s father embodied the change. He was a small-business owner who didn\u2019t hide his frustrations with the IRS. Mullin was a devoted son who ran errands for his father. \u201cYou wouldn\u2019t want to get in his father\u2019s way,\u201d said Denton, who owned the hardware store in town.<\/p>\n

Mullin enrolled in college on a wrestling scholarship but left to help run the family plumbing business. Over the years, he grew the company\u2014known for its signature red vans and its slogan, \u201cThe Red Rooter\u201d\u2014and became its pitchman in commercials. Working around construction sites in the Tulsa metro area was probably when Mullin first had experience with immigrant laborers, people I spoke with there told me; eastern Oklahoma was not a destination for immigrants when Mullin was growing up. Records show that Mullin Plumbing has earned more than $520,000 in federal contracts since 2010, mostly through the Indian Health Service. Mullin Plumbing was listed as minority-owned, Native American\u2013owned, American Indian\u2013owned, and a \u201csmall disadvantaged business,\u201d but according to contracting records, those categories were not a factor in the awards.<\/p>\n

In 2011, before he entered politics, Mullin began hosting a weekly radio show, House Talk<\/em>, modeled in part after NPR\u2019s Car Talk<\/em>, to dispense advice on home improvement and repairs. Friends of the family told me that they think Mullin\u2019s father pushed him to run for Congress around the same time to deploy his combativeness against environmental regulators and tax collectors. Mullin railed against the Affordable Care Act, opposing mandates that would require him to offer coverage to his employees despite having access himself to free health care as a tribal member. Mullin\u2019s 2012 campaign slogan was \u201cA rancher. A businessman. Not a politician.\u201d When he arrived in Washington, he said, he didn\u2019t know how to put on a tie.<\/p>\n

Mullin positioned himself firmly among the most conservative members of Congress, proposing, for example, a total abortion ban, even when a mother\u2019s life is in danger. When he first took office, he pledged to serve a maximum of three terms, then broke the promise in 2018. Mullin explained the decision in a video, seated with Christie, saying that he \u201cdidn\u2019t understand politics\u201d when he got to Washington. With Trump in office, Mullin said, he could have a bigger impact if he stayed on the job. It turned out to be the most pivotal moment of his career, consolidating his transition from D.C. outsider to MAGA insider. \u201cThe first lesson I learned up there is, you gotta build relationships,\u201d Mullin said.<\/p>\n

A private-equity company acquired Mullin Plumbing in 2021 for an undisclosed sum, estimated in the tens of millions of dollars\u2019 worth of shares on the same day of the sale. The next year, Mullin won a special election for an open Senate seat. In both chambers, he was one of the few lawmakers without a four-year college degree, but his recent financial disclosures show an estimated net worth somewhere from $29 million to $97 million.<\/p>\n

John Bankel, a GOP activist in the area who knows the family, told me that he doubts that DHS will be Mullin\u2019s last job in politics. Christie Mullin believes deeply in her husband\u2019s political talents and \u201cis the one who pushes Markwayne to the next level,\u201d he said. Bankel told me that he thinks Mullin could run for president someday.<\/p>\n

Friends of the family told me that Mullin has sometimes regretted not serving in the military or law enforcement. The DHS-secretary job gives him a chance to be a man of action, with a lead role in national security and law enforcement. Mullin\u2019s grandfather, who was Cherokee and a competitive bull rider, served in World War II, and last year, Mullin cited his role in liberating Nazi concentration camps when condemning a group of young Republicans who\u2019d made racist and anti-Semitic statements in group chats.<\/p>\n

Mullin has tried to burnish his own reputation for daring, though in a cryptic way. He has told interviewers that he performed \u201cspecial assignments\u201d outside of the U.S. military. After the Taliban took Kabul in 2021, Mullin asked the U.S. ambassador to Tajikistan to help him bring in a large amount of cash so he could rent a helicopter and lead a dangerous mission into Afghan territory to rescue a mother and her four children, all U.S. citizens. Mullin threatened U.S.-embassy staff when they turned him down. After Trump nominated him for the DHS job, Mullin told senators that the \u201csmell\u201d of war was something he would \u201cnever forget.\u201d When Democrats asked what he meant, Mullin said that he\u2019d taken a classified trip in 2016 as a member of Congress that required specialized conflict-zone training. But he refused to provide more details. \u201cThere\u2019s another side of my bio that I don\u2019t talk about, nor will I,\u201d Mullin previously said on a podcast, in no great hurry to dispel the intrigue.<\/p>\n

Soon, it came out that Mullin had told Senate colleagues during a 2023 closed-door meeting with Jordan\u2019s King Abdullah II that he and other Americans were once rescued when the king sent his personal helicopter, because they could not get help from the U.S. military, according to The New York Times<\/em>. Mullin described blood all over the helicopter. Had Mullin made a top-secret trip into war-torn Syria? Mullin has refused to say, and no one from the administration has cleared up the mystery.<\/p>\n

Not far from Mullin\u2019s old high school, <\/span>in Stilwell, is a cemetery with a historic marker that commemorates the end of the Trail of Tears, the 1,000-mile journey made by thousands of Cherokee who were forced out of their ancestral homes in southeastern Appalachia under the Indian Removal Act of 1830. The ordeal remains central to Cherokee identity\u2014it\u2019s the foundational story of the Cherokee Nation as well as its greatest tragedy. From 1838 to 1839, more than 3,500 Cherokee arrived at the site in Stilwell, an official \u201cdisbandment depot\u201d just outside the borders of the settled United States. The deported families waited in lines to receive government provisions and were sent off into the forest to rebuild their lives. Most of them spent the winter in tents around the edges of the depot site. Some of the more than 1,000 Cherokee who died making the journey are buried in the Stilwell cemetery, according to the National Park Service.<\/p>\n

Removal<\/em> remains an official government term, though today it\u2019s used primarily at DHS to tally ICE deportations. There is no comparison, of course, between the removal of immigrants who enter the United States illegally and the relocation of the Cherokee and other tribes. That doesn\u2019t make deportation less fraught or painful for those who develop deep ties to the United States or have children here. Taking people from their home and separating families are grave and consequential acts.<\/p>\n

Mullin so far has engaged little with these messy realities, at least publicly. Mostly, he has echoed the rhetoric of Trump officials who prefer to depict ICE enforcement as a matter of public safety focused on the removal of dangerous criminals. (ICE data show that only a small percentage of deportees\u2014ranging from about 5 to 15 percent\u2014have violent felony convictions.) Like Tom Homan, the White House \u201cborder czar,\u201d Mullin has seemed most animated when talking about the trafficking and abuse of underage migrants who arrived in record numbers during the Biden administration, an issue that lacks the moral complexity of much of ICE\u2019s other work.<\/p>\n

Republican lawmakers used the reconciliation process last month to score $70 billion in additional funding for Trump\u2019s immigration crackdown over the next three years, adding to the $170 billion they\u2019d obtained in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act last summer without a single Democratic vote. Trump has nominated a Mullin loyalist, the former Oklahoma state trooper Lance Schroyer, to be the next ICE director.<\/p>\n

The flood of congressional funding and recent Supreme Court rulings in favor of tougher enforcement have positioned Trump\u2019s mass-deportation plan for takeoff. That leaves Mullin, who launched his political career attacking big government, as the face of one of the largest-ever law-enforcement operations in U.S. history. Mullin\u2019s \u201cHomeland\u201d department will soon have twice as many ICE officers on the streets, and all of the money it needs to round up and deport 1 million people a year. Mullin would like that to happen quietly, but it will likely trigger new pushback and protest, testing just how far he\u2019s willing to go for Trump.<\/p>\n

Marie-Rose Sheinerman and Isabel Ruehl contributed to this report.<\/em><\/p>\n

*Illustration sources: Jim Watson \/ Getty; Andrew Lichtenstein \/ Corbis \/ Getty; Elizabeth Fernandez \/ Getty; Chip Somodevilla \/ Getty.<\/small><\/p>\n

Read more The AI Bubble Is No Ordinary Bubble<\/a><\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How Markwayne Mullin went from Indian Country to Trump\u2019s immigration enforcer<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1485,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Secretary of Homeland - Commercial Relocation Pros<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1486\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Secretary of Homeland - Commercial Relocation Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"How Markwayne Mullin went from Indian Country to Trump\u2019s immigration enforcer\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1486\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Commercial Relocation Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-07-21T15:43:49+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"24 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1486#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1486\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/3a3374a445f1b5d4852b1d7c15b9fe3a\"},\"headline\":\"The Secretary of Homeland\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-07-21T15:43:49+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1486\"},\"wordCount\":4709,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1486#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/07\\\/e3feedeef2db9fece937bcba3558ec5c.avif\",\"articleSection\":[\"Politics\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1486#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1486\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1486\",\"name\":\"The Secretary of Homeland - 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