Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin is threatening to throw a major airport’s international flights into pandemonium ahead of the FIFA World Cup.
Mullin, who was confirmed as Kristi Noem’s replacement in March, said the department needs to “prioritize federal police officers” and potentially reshuffle some agents in response to protests at the Delaney Hall ICE detention center in Newark, New Jersey, which have gone on for a week.
The former Oklahoma senator appeared on Fox & Friends Thursday morning and said that might mean pulling Customs and Border Protection agents from Newark Liberty International Airport to help quell the protests outside the nearby facility.
“That may affect international flights coming in and out of... their airport because I’m going to have to pull Customs and Border Protection officers out of being able to process international flights and put them helping our ICE agents,” Mullin, 48, told host Brian Kilmeade.
“And, by the way, if you can’t process international flights because customs is closed, you can’t, uh, obviously, process international flights coming in from out of the country,” he added.
The FIFA World Cup, the world’s biggest sporting event, kicks off next month in the U.S. The tournament’s final match will be played on July 19th at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey—just a 15-minute drive from Newark International.
The 82,500-seat stadium will likely be filled to the brim for the match by wealthy soccer fans from all around the world.
Protests outside the Delaney Hall detention center kicked off on Friday in response to reports of unsanitary living conditions and a hunger strike among the center’s 300 detainees, according to ABC News. Activists alleged that the center has fed detainees “rotten frozen food” and have denied them toilet paper.
DHS has denied the allegations, with Mullin himself saying during a Cabinet meeting on Wednesday that there were “only a handful of individuals that was refusing to eat” because they allegedly wanted their ‘ethnic right food.’”
Mullin had said earlier this week that he was “drawing up plans” to end the processing of international flights in sanctuary cities, but doubled back when asked if that meant he would be cancelling all international flights to cities like New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago.
“We are not going to halt the flights,” Mullin told Kilmeade. “What we’re saying is we just won’t be able to process them because we won’t have officers there. We’re gonna have to pull out our Customs and Border Patrol officers that process these flights and put them in these facilities to help protect our employees coming out of work.”
“And if they’re not there processing international flights, then those individuals, when the... airlines land, can’t—well, they won’t be admitted into the United States," he added.
The Daily Beast has reached out to ICE and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey for comment on Mullin’s proposal.
Reached for comment, DHS referred the Daily Beast to Mullin’s remarks: “We’re 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, we shouldn’t be processing international flights into their cities either, because they don’t want us to enforce immigration but they want us to process immigration at their facilities? Nothing about that makes sense to me.”
Travel groups have condemned the move, with the U.S. Travel Association saying it “would have devastating consequences for the travel industry and communities that depend on international visitation.”
Even Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy appeared skeptical of the proposal when asked about it in a congressional hearing last week, saying that “we shouldn’t shut down air travel in a state that doesn’t agree with our politics.”
Mullin shared a social media video on Thursday afternoon talking about the Delaney Hall detention center, where he slammed Democrats and held up photos of detainees along with their alleged crimes.
“The left sanctuary city politicians that are running this Democrat-controlled area will sit there and tell you it’s because of the conditions of the facility. But it has nothing to do with the conditions of the facility,” he said. “It’s the fact that they want to release criminals back on the streets.”
“Well President Trump made it a campaign promise: bring back law and order to our towns and make America safe again,” he continued. “And that’s what he’s delivering on every single day, and I get the privilege to help push that agenda.”
