Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin is facing a chorus of criticisms voiced by supporters of President Donald Trump, despite shepherding the federal government toward a historic rate of deportations.
Mullin took over the department from Kristi Noem in the spring and has continued the president’s mass deportations agenda while largely avoiding controversies that dogged his predecessor.
According to senior DHS officials, the administration is nearing its 1 millionth deportation since Trump reentered office last January. As of July 12, DHS’s most up-to-date data, the administration had deported more than 985,000 immigrants, on top of the more than 2.2 million self-deportations logged across that same timeframe.
In fiscal year 2026, Immigration and Customs Enforcement data showed that nearly 360,000 illegal immigrants had been deported, putting the administration on pace to match if not exceed deportations logged during the previous fiscal year.
Furthermore, according to DHS officials, ICE carried out 51,000 arrests in July, the single highest monthly total posted across Trump’s two terms. ICE is currently averaging just shy of 1,500 arrests per day on Mullin’s watch. According to DHS insiders, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, the president’s top immigration adviser, has tasked the department with making 2,000 arrests per day, though the White House publicly denies any type of arrest quota.
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Still, a number of prominent MAGA voices have begun arguing in recent days that Mullin’s numbers aren’t cutting it and that the president needs to replace him, before the midterm elections, if possible.
Laura Loomer, a conservative activist with a direct line to the president and, at times, outsize sway over the administration’s personnel decisions, called for Mullin to be fired on X earlier this month. She told the Washington Examiner that she’d specifically “been telling [the White House] for months about how bad [Mullin] is.”
The secretary, an avowed Trump supporter, didn’t help his case with remarks delivered before the National Governors Association last weekend, where he argued for reforming the immigration system to provide more employment visas, specifically in the agriculture sector.
“This narrative that it steals American jobs is true in some industries, it’s not true for all industries,” he said during a discussion moderated by NGA chairman Gov. Kevin Stitt (R-OK). “We want to take care of Americans first. It’s our economy, it’s our homeland, but there’s a way to utilize labor where we’re not having the participation rate we need to, and we can plug those holes.”
Critics, including Loomer, quickly jumped on Mullin’s remarks, accusing the secretary of pushing “amnesty” for illegal immigrants.
Greg Bovino, whom Noem had appointed to oversee Border Patrol and whose own hard-nosed tactics became a flashpoint for the administration early this year, wrote that “Mullin delivered a masterclass in how to give terrible answers during a single interview.”
“Listen as he politely explains why your safety comes second to his lobbyists,” he captioned a video clip of Mullin’s remarks to NGA. “This is the man running DHS. Now you know why we’re not getting mass deportations.”
“Mullin is the wrong guy at the wrong time for the wrong job — a time when we need to focus on ‘mass deportations,’ we get an amnesty advocate,” Steve Bannon, a former top political adviser to the president, told Politico.
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson shook off those critiques, saying that Mullin retains the full confidence of the president.
“Thanks to President Trump’s leadership we have the most secure border in history, we are deporting record numbers of illegal aliens, we have cracked down on illegal alien fraud, and we are denaturalizing individuals who illegally procured American citizenship,” she wrote in a statement. “The President has confidence in Secretary Mullin and his entire Administration to carry out the agenda the American people voted for.”
A DHS spokesperson added that Mullin and the department are “focused on delivering on the President’s mission to deport illegal aliens and protect the homeland. Anyone who says otherwise is just trying to sow division and create an illusion of chaos.”
A former senior Trump White House official additionally suggested to the Washington Examiner that the Mullin critics could be split into two separate camps.
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“I think there’s two camps to this: some of these people are trying to rile up the base” the former White House official assessed. “Let’s be honest, things don’t look great for the GOP right now. You’ve got the war [in Iran]. The economy is f****d. What better way is there to get the juices flowing again before November than by trying to get people, or at least Republicans, to focus on Trump’s bread and butter? The rest are zealots, and there’s just no pleasing those people.”