Markwayne Mullin’s Tightrope: How a Former Plumber Became Trump’s Immigration Enforcer

Markwayne Mullin, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, lasted less than a day with one of his first major policy decisions. After ICE officers killed two people during traffic stops they'd bungled—a Mexican construction worker in Texas and a Colombian delivery driver in Maine—Mullin ordered an emergency halt to most vehicle stops. But President Trump reversed the decision via social media post the next morning, publicly undercutting his own cabinet member.

The incident exposed the core tension Mullin now navigates. Trump wants record-breaking deportations carried out with minimal public backlash. Mullin was brought in to execute that agenda, yet every ramp-up in ICE intensity produces deaths and violence that trigger political blowback. His predecessor, Kristi Noem, was forced out after ICE killed two U.S. citizens protesting the agency in Minneapolis in January.

Mullin's path to DHS was unconventional. The former Oklahoma senator and House member dropped out of college to run his father's plumbing business, later becoming a wrestler and mixed-martial-arts fighter known more for organizing bipartisan workout sessions on Capitol Hill than for immigration expertise. He had no military service, law enforcement background, or seat on the congressional committees overseeing DHS. One DHS official familiar with his leadership told me: "He wasn't brought in because of his command of CBP and ICE issues. He was brought in to restore normalcy."

But normalcy is precisely what MAGA hard-liners reject. When Mullin shows hesitation about the human toll of enforcement operations, right-wing critics mock him as "Markwayne Muslim" and the "Kung Fu Plumber."

What Mullin brings to Trump is something the president values above technical competence: unwavering loyalty. That allegiance traces to 2020, when Mullin's then-15-year-old son Jim suffered a severe brain injury during a wrestling match. After Jim collapsed and spent 26 hours in a coma, Trump lent his plane to fly the teenager to a rehab clinic in California and called weekly for a year and a half to check on his "buddy." Mullin later told a Senate panel that the two "were acquaintances before that. We've been friends ever since." He has since declared he would follow Trump "into any situation"—and proved it by joining false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, confronting rioters on January 6, and now abandoning a potentially long congressional career for a post widely regarded as one of Washington's most thankless jobs.

Mullin's background in running his own companies means he's unaccustomed to following chains of command. Some DHS officials supportive of his tenure say he lacks the immigration policy grounding to fully grasp the consequences of enforcement decisions. When he demonstrated unease with the vehicle-stop killings, he was quick to declare via social media that he and Trump were "on the same page" on ICE tactics. Yet the specifics remain murky: Which page, exactly, and on what terms will loyalty bend when another ICE operation kills an innocent person?