Senate committee advances Markwayne Mullin’s nomination to lead homeland security

A key Senate committee on Thursday advanced Markwayne Mullin’s nomination to lead the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on a near party line vote, a day after the Republican senator faced questions at his confirmation hearing about his approach to Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda and accusations of encouraging violence.

Nearly all eight Republicans on the Senate committee on homeland security and governmental affairs voted to advance Mullin’s nomination, with the sole exception of the panel’s chair, Rand Paul of Kentucky, who the day prior had harshly criticized his colleague for comments he made about a neighbor who assaulted Paul in 2017, and an incident six years later in which Mullin readied himself to fight a witness at a committee hearing.

John Fetterman of Pennsylvania was the sole Democrat to support Mullin’s nomination, with his other six colleagues opposing him.

Mullin’s nomination will now be considered by the full Senate, where Republicans appear to have the numbers to confirm him. A vote on his confirmation is expected in the coming days.

“The Department of Homeland Security needs a leader who can restore the trust DHS has broken with the American people, and with this committee. At his confirmation hearing yesterday, we saw that, unfortunately, Senator Mullin is not up to that challenge,” the committee’s top Democrat, Gary Peters, said in brief comments before the vote.

He accused Mullin of failing to be “forthright and transparent” during the confirmation process, and added that he was “very troubled by Senator Mullin’s willingness to condone political violence, and the message that that sends across DHS”.

The Michigan senator noted that beyond Mullin’s 2023 confrontation with Teamsters president Sean O’Brien during a committee hearing in which he appeared to be ready to brawl with the witness, a Senate ethics committee report had found that he “advocated physical violence as a means to resolve political disagreement”.

Democrats peppered Mullin, a first-term senator from Oklahoma who has publicly backed Trump’s hardline approach to immigration enforcement, with questions at his Wednesday confirmation hearing about how far he would go in supporting the administration’s policies.

Adopting a more diplomatic tone than he has taken in the past, he expressed regret for critical comments he had made about Alex Pretti, one of two US citizens killed by immigration agents in Minneapolis during the tumultuous surge into the city earlier this year, and also signaled he would like DHS’s operations to have a lower public profile than under outgoing secretary Kristi Noem.

But Mullin otherwise showed few breaks with the president, refusing to commit to not having immigration agents positioned near polling stations during upcoming elections, and dodging questions about specific immigration arrests by saying he was not familiar with those cases.

Mullin did say that he would ensure immigration agents obtain judicial warrants before entering homes or businesses, amid reports that officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which DHS oversees, have been told they could conduct searches with only an administrative warrant, which is signed by a supervisor at the agency, rather than a judge.