Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said his department has moved away from workplace raids in favor of targeting specific individuals with warrants, a shift he says is driving up arrest numbers even as it changes how enforcement looks on the ground.
Mullin made the comments Tuesday during a Breitbart News event, speaking with the outlet’s Washington Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle about the differences between immigration enforcement under the Biden administration and the current approach under President Trump.
Asked to contrast the two administrations, Mullin pointed first to the sheer scale of people let into the country under Biden, which he estimated at “between 10 and 23 million.”
“I think the number is probably in the 20s, because when you start talking to the sector chiefs that were there during the Biden administration, and the numbers that they were processing, and how fast they were processing, there are some individuals that they were processing 100 percent as they came across the border within hours, and they were not doing biometrics with them,” Mullin said.
According to Mullin, many of those crossing were processed without proper vetting. “They [weren’t] checking anything. They were just simply taking a name, giving asylum, putting them on probation, and ship them out the door,” he said.
Mullin said DHS is now going back through those cases. “So, when we talk about difference of enforcement, the reason why our arrest numbers have increased drastically, and you look at what’s happening with our deportation, what we have done is become very focused on targeting individuals, instead of doing job site raids, Home Depot raids — which are okay, but you don’t know who you are gathering all the time,” he said.
He described the new approach as warrant-driven, explaining that agents pursue specific people rather than sweeping through locations.
“When we’re doing targeted people, we’re going after people we have warrants on — administrative warrants or judicial warrants,” Mullin said. “We always have three to four — what we call, collateral criminals with them. The individual’s never by themselves, so when we serve a warrant, our numbers are going up because everybody we’re making contact with, we’re making an arrest.”
Mullin’s remarks offer a window into how DHS leadership is characterizing its enforcement strategy and its justification for rising arrest totals under the current administration.
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