Mullin seeks to win over immigration hardliners with messaging blitz

Por Myah Ward, Eric Bazail-Eimil and Jessica Piper — POLITICO – TOP Stories

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has launched a PR blitz to save his floundering reputation among immigration hardliners who think he’s soft on deportations. So far, it’s not working.

The Department of Homeland Security chief, who has faced an onslaught of attacks from MAGA activists and immigration hardliners in recent months, has grown alarmed by the blowback and is looking to shore up support with a key part of the Trump coalition, according to an administration official and another person familiar with the messaging effort, both granted anonymity to discuss internal thinking.

“Mullin is very concerned about the criticism, so the effort to hammer stats and ‘tough talk’ is intentional,” said the official.

Official White House and DHS social media accounts, including Mullin’s, have been mentioning ICE and deportations more frequently as the summer has gone on, according to a POLITICO review of thousands of posts on X since Mullin’s confirmation. Key White House and DHS social media accounts mentioned “ICE” and “illegal aliens” roughly 50% more frequently in July and August compared to May and June.

Online, DHS has also been describing its policies in more aggressive terms: Since the start of July, the agency has commonly referred to “hunting” immigrants who are unlawfully in the country, POLITICO’s review found, an increase compared to earlier in the year. And the official government accounts have increasingly derided opposition to deportation policies from the “radical left.”

The PR campaign reflects an acute awareness inside the administration that immigration hardliners — who Republicans need to vote in November — have turned on Mullin, and more broadly, the administration’s immigration posture. In recent months, immigration hawks and MAGA allies have intensified public pressure, accusing the administration of failing to deliver on mass deportations. They have also decried what they see as a lack of immigration enforcement at businesses and work sites, too little arrest and deportation data released publicly, and a focus on the “worst of the worst” criminal offenders.

Mullin, during an interview at the GOP midterm convention in Dallas, said “our base wants mass deportation. We need mass deportation.” He touted immigration enforcement stats, while saying the agency is “doing it in a different way” and trying to “turn down the temperature.”

The president, during his convention speech Wednesday night, also touted the administration’s progress on immigration, particularly his clampdown at the southern border and a drop in crime: “We have the lowest level of illegal immigration ever recorded in our country,” the president said.

White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said “of course” the White House will “post about one of the greatest successes: ending Biden’s invasion of our country and removing criminal illegal aliens from American communities.”

“Thanks to President Trump’s strong immigration enforcement policies, approximately three million illegals have left the United States and zero illegals have been released at the border in fifteen months,” she said in a statement. “While extreme Democrats continue to put criminal illegal aliens before American citizens, try to defund federal law enforcement, and fight for open borders, President Trump and Republicans will continue enforcing the law.”

The intensifying criticism has placed Mullin in a precarious position, nearly six months after he was tapped to shore up the department in the wake of bipartisan fallout from the Trump administration’s Minneapolis operation in which federal agents killed two U.S. citizens. He has successfully kept his agency out of the headlines, eliminated flashy, high-profile raids that drew widespread protests earlier this year, and in the early months after Minneapolis, the administration eased up on aggressive messaging around mass deportations. He also paused some vehicle stops in July — only for Trump to reverse him — after two ICE-involved shootings this summer.

But that approach has fueled critics on the right. As the administration has put more distance between itself and the tumult of January, immigration hawks and MAGA critics have questioned Mullin’s qualifications — and whether he is sufficiently committed to the administration’s deportation agenda. Those doubts erupted into a MAGA firestorm last month, when Mullin suggested during a speech at the National Governors Association meeting that more employment visas for certain industries should be on the table to fill gaps in the labor market. He also highlighted the nearly 900,000 people who had become U.S. citizens over the previous 12 months, comments his critics have seized on.

“When you get up there and boast about naturalizing 900,000 individuals while you’re supposed to be in the middle of the biggest mass deportation campaign in history, that runs counter to each other … That’s not a good look,” said Greg Bovino, the former Border Patrol commander who was sidelined by the White House after Minneapolis. “So I think they’re trying to do a little damage control.”

DHS said in a statement that it “will continue using every tool at its disposal to keep the American people informed as our agents work to Make America Safe Again.” DHS also claimed that 1.1 million unauthorized illegal aliens have been arrested as of Sept. 7 of this year.

“We’re thrilled Politico has noticed and plans to write about all the illegal aliens we are deporting from the United States. Nothing has changed; DHS continues to bring maximum toughness and maximum deportations,” DHS said. “President Trump and Secretary Mullin are now enforcing the law, arresting illegal aliens who have no right to be in our country—and have reversed Democrats’ deadly catch and release policy.”

Some of the challenges facing Mullin were inevitable for whomever Trump selected to take over the DHS role. Executing the president’s vow to deport millions of unauthorized immigrants already faced steep operational, logistical and legal challenges, and now the issue is politically dicey, too, as negative voter sentiment about the president’s immigration agenda persists.

“In every administration, there are always advocacy groups who are impatient, who think the appointees have gone wobbly, who would like to see things done differently,” said Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that looks to curtail legal and illegal immigration. She added that while the tactics have shifted, she believes the goals of reducing the illegal population, securing the border and reducing legal immigration, remain the same.

“And they, I think, can fairly say that they’re getting even bigger numbers without the splashy in-your-face operations,” she said.

DHS has countered the criticism with press releases highlighting record arrests in both July and August — with ICE hitting nearly 51,000 arrests last month. One White House graphic shared last month showed July arrests doubling the Obama-era monthly peak. Democrats and immigration advocates say the administration is padding deportation numbers by detaining people without criminal records.

The department is also once again promoting self-deportation — a practice that became less visible after Mullin’s predecessor, former Secretary Kristi Noem, left office. DHS said in the press release that more than 3 million unauthorized immigrants have left the U.S. since Trump returned to office. The agency’s social media accounts have also resumed posting pictures of shackled immigrants clad in prison sweats waiting on runways to board deportation flights.

And on the policy front, the administration is trumpeting record deportation numbers as it proves that it could achieve ambitious removals of unauthorized immigrants from the United States without the theatrical tactics that sank Noem’s tenure. It is also clamping down on alleged fraud in the immigration system, with DHS leading those efforts. The department last month imposed a $103,265 fee for all petitions for H-1B visas, a longtime target of immigration hardliners who say U.S. companies have abused the program to undercut skilled American workers.

But many of Mullin’s critics aren’t buying it. The person familiar with the messaging effort said it’s unlikely it will be enough for Mullin to get hardliners on his side.

“They know it’s performative,” the person said.

Mark Morgan, who served as head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol during the first Trump administration, said much of the skepticism comes from DHS’s lack of transparency with the data — a problem that preceded Mullin. DHS has not released a full accounting of immigrant removals since Trump took office, which led some of the president’s allies to sue the administration this summer to compel the release of figures. DHS officials have periodically leaked figures showing a huge spike in detentions and arrests, but they have yet to break down which figures are being counted in those totals.

“It’s all PR. You can see it. It’s all political rhetoric. But that’s the way it’s been all along. They haven’t provided us any hard numbers. We have to decipher through political rhetoric and selective press releases and the release of selected numbers,” Morgan said.

Hardliners have also been pressing the administration to go after employers as a way to discourage unauthorized migration to the United States. Mark Krikorian, who leads the Center for Immigration Studies, said that the moves on employment visa programs “clearly does show that at the White House there is a concern that this needs to go beyond border enforcement and actually address legal immigration.”

But “we keep hearing a push on worksite enforcement is in the works,” he added, noting that those promises have come from figures as high up as acting ICE director David Venturella. “This is necessary for the administration’s own objectives. You can’t scale up self-deportation if there’s not worksite enforcement.”

Fonte: POLITICO – TOP Stories