Kristi Noem’s Replacement Bows to Protesters

ICE’s reputation is in the toilet and Trump-world knows it

Markwayne Mullin gets emotional during confirmation hearing

Senator Markwayne Mullin, Trump’s next homeland security chief, testified before his colleagues this week and apologized.

He’s sorry about the ham-fisted conduct of the department. He’s sorry about warrantless searches. He’s sorry about the labeling of protesters as terrorists.

In his confirmation hearing, Mullin sounded like a disgraced politician begging for a second chance.

“My goal in six months is that we’re not in the lead story every single day,” Mullin said. It was an obvious reference to the mountain of bad publicity regarding ICE, Border Patrol and other homeland security agencies the past several months.

The media won’t admit it, but the anti-ICE protesters in cities across the country like Minneapolis, Chicago and Los Angeles, won big. And as a result, Mullin had to roll over and show his belly in a humiliating display of submission to the popular will. During his testimony, he couldn’t seem to stop apologizing for the reign of Kristi Noem. Mullin offered up one concession after another, the exact opposite of Noem’s unyielding, my-way-or-the-highway rhetoric.

“Those words probably should have been retracted,” Mullin said about his echoing of Noem’s smearing of Minneapolis protester Alex Pretti as a terrorist immediately after he was killed by federal agents. “I went out there too fast. I was responding immediately without the facts. That’s my fault. That won’t happen as secretary.”

Asked directly if he regrets his statement, he said flatly: “Yes, sir.”

Ask yourself: when have you ever heard the Trump administration apologize like this before? It was an extraordinary act of surrender to the public.

On the practice of warrantless “forcible entries” into homes, Mullin committed to a stricter standard, saying: “A judicial warrant will be used to go into houses and places of businesses unless we’re pursuing someone that enters … that place.”

On Noem’s ignoring her own Inspector General and failing to hand over documents to Congress, Mullin promised to scrap the policy requiring the Secretary to personally approve small grants, calling it “micromanaging” that botched disaster response.

The Trump administration has spent months treating blue-state elected officials — governors, mayors, attorneys general — as enemy combatants. It threatened to withhold federal funds from sanctuary cities. It sent federal agents into states whose leaders explicitly said they weren’t welcome.

Mullin apologized about that as well. He promised blue Senators that he’d lower the temperature, saying, “I respect every one of you guys... You were elected by your state and I respect that.”

Mullin decried “the partisan bickering that we have.”

None of this is the language of a government on offense. It is a meaningful departure from how homeland security and ICE has been operating. It is a retreat dressed up as humility. Mullin watched Noem turn DHS into a meme account and get pushed out. And he’s calculating that the only way to survive this job is to stop acting like the agency is at war with the American public.

But the bigger picture is that Noem is gone and Mullin is adopting this new way because public pressure forced it.

Despite all the media coverage of the confirmation hearing, virtually none of it acknowledges that the protagonist here is not Mullin, Noem, Trump, or anyone in Washington. It’s the people.

— Edited by William M. Arkin