WASHINGTON (AP) — Markwayne Mullin, President Donald Trump's pick for Department of Homeland Security secretary, said Wednesday that Congress needed to put partisanship aside and fund the department as he vowed to get down to work and keep it out of controversies that under Secretary Kristi Noem have kept it on the front pages of the news.
Mullin is appearing before senators on Wednesday for his confirmation hearing, where he faced questions over his vision for a department tasked with carrying out the Republican administration's push for mass deportations, which has prompted a weekslong funding lapse for the department.
Mullin, an Oklahoma senator, has spent 13 years in Congress and has emerged as a close ally of the president's. If confirmed, he would replace Noem, who was fired earlier this month amid mounting criticism of her leadership.
“I can have different opinions with everybody in this room, but as secretary of Homeland I’ll be protecting everybody,” Mullin told a packed room. “My goal in six months is that we’re not in the lead story every single day.”
The hearing is Mullin’s first opportunity since being nominated to publicly present his plans for the third-largest department in the Cabinet. The sprawling department, with a workforce of roughly 260,000 employees, oversees a diverse mission set of responsibilities ranging from protecting the president from a bullet to helping states recover from disasters to deporting people in the country illegally.
In his opening remarks, he emphasized the need to restore funding to DHS.
“We have to get DHS funded. We have to, my friends. We have to set the partisan side down. And we have to realize that we’re putting our homeland and the peace of mind at risk for the American people,” Mullin told senators.
He praised the DHS employees working without pay: "We should all be trying to fund them.”
Committee chair says Mullin ‘applauds violence’
The first part of the hearing was marked by a fiery opening statement by committee chair, Republican Rand Paul, who lambasted comments Mullin made calling him a “freaking snake” after a funding fight, echoing Trump’s own harsh criticisms of the Kentucky senator, who frequently goes it alone upending Senate procedures over his own priorities.
“I just wonder if someone who applauds violence against their political opponents is the right person to lead an agency that has struggled to accept limits to the proper use of force?” Paul wondered.
According to Oklahoma conservative talk show host David Arnett, who wrote about the remarks on his Substack, Mullin recently called Paul — who frequently defects from his own party on a number of matters — “a freaking snake. And I understand completely why his neighbor did what he did. And I told him that to his face.”
One of Paul's neighbors several years ago had tackled and injured him over a lawn care dispute.
Mullin challenged the chairman’s suggestion that he is liar, and he insisted they can have differences and still work together.
“For you to say I’m a liar, Sir, that’s not accurate,” Mullin said.
Speaking of Paul, Mullin said, “We just don’t get along.”
Mullin, the Trump ally
Mullin is a former mixed martial arts fighter who ran a plumbing business in Oklahoma before running for Congress. He has in the past indicated support for immigration operations, and he's expected to be a faithful ally for Trump's agenda if he is confirmed for the top job at DHS.
“Whether it be protecting the homeland from bad actors, stopping dangerous drugs from flowing into American communities, or removing the worst-of-the-worst criminal illegal aliens, Senator Mullin will work tirelessly to implement the President’s agenda,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in an emailed statement Tuesday.
The president's immigration agenda and how Mullin intends to execute on it is expected to be a key line of questioning as Democrats drill down into Mullin's views. The hearing comes as the president's mass deportations agenda is at a crossroads, and Mullin will face pressure to reach the president's lofty deportation goals when the public mood has soured over the aggressive way immigration enforcement operations have been carried out.
Anger over the Trump administration's immigration enforcement tactics has prompted Democrats to refuse to fund DHS until it makes a series of changes to its officers' conduct.
Democratic Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan, the ranking member on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said the Democrats were asking for “straightforward” reforms in line with rules police departments follow.
Peters underlined the challenges that Homeland Security is facing from threats from Iran to criminal hackers and said the department needed someone with a “steady hand." But Peters said he had “reservations” about whether Mullin was ready to assume such a significant role.
As the latest partial government shutdown drags on, there have been long security lines at a growing number of U.S airports as security screeners go into another month without pay. Republicans have repeatedly charged that Democrats are risking the nation’s national security by blocking funding to the department.
DHS endured turmoil under Noem
Under Noem, intense enforcement operations were launched in places including Los Angeles, Chicago and Minneapolis, where immigrants were rounded up in arrest sweeps and protesters clashed with federal officers.
Activists and politicians accused DHS officers of smashing car windows, roughing up bystanders who tried to record their activities and detaining immigrants in squalid conditions. The shooting deaths of two protesters — Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis — contributed to swelling criticism of Trump’s immigration agenda.
Homeland Security has said that its officers are responding with force only when necessary and have blamed activists and politicians, who they say are dialing up the rhetoric against their officers.
Mullin also will likely face questions about the future of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, which is in the middle of a tumultuous reform process after Trump said he wanted to overhaul it, if not eliminate it.
Noem led a Trump-appointed FEMA Review Council that was set to recommend sweeping changes to how the federal government helps states, tribes and territories prepare for, respond to and recover from disasters. The reforms had the potential to drastically reduce federal support for disasters and put more responsibility on local jurisdictions.
Meanwhile, under Noem’s leadership, all contracts above $100,000 had to wait for her approval. That led to long delays for states desperate for reimbursements for money they’d already spent on things like storm debris removal.
After two acting administrators left FEMA during Noem’s tenure, the agency is still without a permanent head.
Trump said he was making Noem a special envoy for a new security initiative that would focus on the Western Hemisphere. Noem thanked Trump for the appointment and touted her accomplishments as secretary, saying she made “historic accomplishments” at DHS to make America safe.
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Associated Press writer Gabriela Aoun Angueira contributed.
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