DHS Sec Mullin Floors Senate Democrat With Jaw-Dropping Answer On Whether He’ll Comply With Court Orders

Screenshot via C-SPAN.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin testified before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee Tuesday about his agency’s 2027 budget request, and shocked Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) with his response to repeated questions about complying with court orders.

Back in March, President Donald Trump announced that DHS Secretary Kristi Noem was “moving” to a new position and he was nominating then-Sen. Mullin (R-OK) to take her place.

Noem’s ouster came after growing backlash to Trump’s immigration crackdown, sparking nationwide protests and multiple court challenges, especially after two fatal shootings of U.S. citizens in Minneapolis: Renee Good on Jan. 7 by ICE agent Jonathan Ross, and Alex Pretti on Jan. 24 by Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez. Polling shows public opinion has significantly soured on the Trump administration’s immigration policies, even among Republicans.

The administration’s immigration policies have also fared poorly in court. An ongoing case tracker by Politico has tallied over 13,000 federal court rulings in ICE detention cases, with “at least 11,550” not going Trump’s way — including many judges who were appointed by Republicans or even Trump himself.

In other words, “Will you direct your department to comply with court orders?” is not a mere theoretical exercise. Due to the spike in detentions, deportations, and other adverse immigration actions pursued by ICE, the number of legal actions has also spiked, and, as noted above, the vast majority of court rulings have been against the Trump administration.

Murphy, the ranking Democrat on the appropriations subcommittee, sought to nail down a response from Mullin on this issue during his turn to ask questions Tuesday. (The relevant section begins at roughly the 25 minute mark on the video embedded below.)

Murphy opened his remarks by saying that he thought Mullin was “crazy to have taken on this job,” but he had promised at his confirmation hearing “that you would get DHS out of the headlines” after Noem’s rocky tenure, “and we took you at your word, but nothing has really gotten better.”

The senator from Connecticut was clearly not amused by Mullin’s threat to cut off international flights to airports in cities that don’t cooperate with ICE, calling it “completely illegal” and said it would throw the entire national travel system “into chaos.”

This was a symptom of the larger problem, Murphy continued, with Democrats and Republicans unable to agree on DHS funding because the agency had been “run so far off the rails.”

“Every day this agency is breaking the law at scale, and wasting billions of taxpayer dollars,” Murphy declared, accusing Mullin’s agency of no longer implementing the law, but rather making it up. Murphy mentioned “10,000 times” that judges had overturned ICE’s decisions (note: according to the Politico tracker cited above, that figure is slightly out-of-date and the current number is approaching 12,000), and denounced the agency for locking up U.S. citizens, for “kill[ing] peaceful protesters just for getting in the way,” and for deporting “hundreds of thousands of immigrants who broke no laws, who were playing by the rules, who have legitimate claims to stay in the United States.”

Murphy called it “stunning” how often judges had found that DHS had violated court orders, and said that “should be unacceptable to anyone on this committee who claims to care about the rule of law.” He added that he understood that Mullin and others in the Trump administration disagreed with federal immigration laws for being too lenient, “but the law is the law, [and] your disagreement with it does not give you permission to just make up a different law.”

“Don’t ask us to fund an agency that just makes up its own law,” Murphy concluded his opening statement.

Murphy dug in deeper to the issue of compliance with court orders during his 5-minute question period (beginning roughly around the 1 hour mark), repeatedly attempting to get Mullin to verbally commit to complying with court orders — and getting frustrated as Mullin repeatedly refused to do so.

The senator quoted from a recent opinion written by a Republican-appointed federal judge calling out DHS for ignoring court orders that ruled its actions were illegal or unconstitutional. Murphy added that although many of the violations occurred when Noem was still heading the agency, this was still a “really important discussion for us to have,” because “it is very hard for us to figure out how to fund an agency that is violating the law.”

A transcript of their exchange is below:

MURPHY: Now that you are on the job, can you commit to us that if a court judges something ICE is doing, something DHS is doing, is illegal, is unconstitutional, tells you to stop — that you will comply with the court order?

MULLIN: Ranking Member Murphy, I will tell you that we will never break the Constitution, and we’re not going to break the law, but we’re gonna enforce our nation’s laws, and we’re gonna enforce the laws that you guys passed, and that we implement. We will never go outside that, and if we do, we will hold each other accountable for that.

MURPHY: But that doesn’t sound like the same thing as committing that you will obey a court order. Obviously, the entire structure of the federal government gives the power to the federal court to divine whether you are obeying or not. I mean, I think it’s an easy thing to say. Will you or will you not implement court orders?

MULLIN: If we didn’t think courts were politicized, then I would probably be able to answer that. But we see courts over and over again that use their bench for their political opinion, not just the rule of law. And we can see that because we see how many times —

MURPHY: You’re going to pick and choose what court orders you obey —

MULLIN: No, no, don’t put words in my mouth.

MURPHY: What are you saying then?

MULLIN: What I’m saying is, we’re saying we’re going to enforce the law and we’re never gonna break the Constitution.

MURPHY: You just said that you will not follow every court order because you —

MULLIN: No, no, Chris — Senator, don’t — don’t start putting words in my mouth. That’s not what I said. I said I will never break the Constitution, we’re gonna enforce the law.

MURPHY: Will you implement court orders when they tell you to stop?

MULLIN: You’re making an assumption on court orders I haven’t seen —

MURPHY: Will you or will you not?

MULLIN: I am going to enforce the law and I’ll never break the Constitution.

MURPHY [throwing up his hands in exasperation]: Listen, if you’re a Republican or a Democrat on this committee, you should be really, really freaked out at this answer!

MULLIN: We should be really concerned about the rulings that come out of the courts, and how often they get overturned.

MURPHY: Our federal system falls apart if you are telling me —

MULLIN: — they fall apart when you have a judge that makes a political opinion from a bench — they’re outside the law too. Not all judges are above the law but sometimes they think they are. That’s why we see lower courts get overturned by higher courts constantly.

Murphy shook his head and moved on to ask about the latest events at the Delaney Hall ICE detention facility in Chicago.

After completing his Bachelor of Arts at Wiliams College, Murphy earned a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Connecticut.

Mullin attended Missouri Valley College on a wrestling scholarship but dropped out after two years. He later got an Associate in Applied Science in plumbing from the Oklahoma State University Institute of Technology.

Watch the video above via C-SPAN.

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