Here is the plan from the man Donald Trump put in charge of Homeland Security: if a city won’t help round up its immigrant neighbors, that city loses its airport.
That is not hyperbole. That is the actual proposal. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin — the former Oklahoma senator sworn in by Attorney General Pam Bondi in March — has spent weeks threatening to pull Customs and Border Protection officers out of airports in so-called “sanctuary cities.” On Thursday, in yet another Fox News appearance, he doubled down.
Without CBP officers on the ground, international flights can’t be legally processed. They don’t get rerouted. They get canceled. And it isn’t only foreigners who’d be stranded — without customs, returning Americans can’t legally re-enter their own country either.
So let’s call this what it is. It’s collective punishment. It’s a federal official threatening to wreck the economies of entire cities, strand millions of travelers, and choke off international cargo, all because local officials won’t deputize their police into a deportation machine. He is holding ordinary people hostage to win a political fight.
What he actually said
Mullin’s reasoning is simple and ugly. He told Fox’s Sean Hannity that DHS is “drawing up plans” to stop processing international flights in cities where, as he put it, “the local radical left Democrats aren’t allowing us to do our jobs.” The logic: if you won’t cooperate with immigration enforcement once travelers leave the airport, you don’t deserve to have an international airport at all.
When co-host Brian Kilmeade asked point-blank whether this would halt every international flight into hubs like Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York, Mullin tried to thread a needle. DHS wasn’t “going to halt the flights,” he said — it just “won’t be able to process them” because there won’t be officers there. That’s a distinction without a difference. A flight no one is allowed to process is a flight that doesn’t land.
Mullin escalated his threats after protests erupted outside an ICE detention center in Newark, where demonstrators say conditions are inhumane. He dismissed those concerns and pointed at Newark’s airport — which moved 24.5 million international passengers last year — as if to say: nice airport you’ve got there, shame if something happened to it.
That detention center is the part that should stick with you. People are protesting because they believe other people are being held in cruel conditions. Mullin’s response was not to look into the conditions. It was to threaten the city’s economic lifeline. The cruelty isn’t a side effect here. It’s the point.
Which cities are on the list
Mullin has been coy about naming targets, but the map isn’t hard to draw. The Justice Department already published a list of jurisdictions it considers “sanctuaries”: Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, New York City, Newark, Philadelphia, Seattle, and San Francisco — nearly all of them major international gateways.
The Atlantic reported that Mullin quietly convened airline and travel-industry executives at DHS headquarters and told them he might cut CBP staffing at airports serving those jurisdictions, with New York’s airports, Portland International, and Washington Dulles among the likely first targets.
The timing matters: the cutbacks are reportedly being held until after the U.S. finishes hosting the World Cup in July. They know exactly how much damage this would do. They’re just waiting for the cameras to leave. In Chicago, the threat covers both O’Hare and Midway. In Los Angeles, it covers LAX.
Even Trump’s own people think this is insane
Here’s how far off the rails this is: the pushback is coming from inside the administration.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, hardly a moderate, flatly rejected it: “We shouldn’t shut down air travel in a state that doesn’t agree with our politics.” Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said she’s spoken with Mullin and believes the World Cup alone makes the plan unworkable — you cannot tell the world to come to your country and then bar them at the gate.
The travel industry is alarmed. Airlines for America warned that cutting CBP staffing would have “a devastating effect on the airline and tourism industries,” disrupting carriers, travelers, and cargo alike. The U.S. Travel Association called it devastating for the communities that depend on international visitors.
The critics outside government didn’t hold back. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council said the plan amounts to “deliberately stabbing the US economy in the back,” and that even floating it publicly is “a sign of madness.”
Minneapolis attorney Will Stancil noted the politics: with Trump already historically unpopular, deliberately causing “apocalyptic levels of chaos” at the nation’s biggest airports is a strange hill to choose. And retired air traffic controller Vivian Lumbard asked the question a lot of us are asking: do any of these people understand how the real world works?
Why this is a civil rights story, not just a travel story
It would be easy to file this under “Trump official says unhinged thing on Fox,” shrug, and move on. Don’t.
This is what authoritarian governance looks like when it stops pretending. The federal government is supposed to enforce the law evenly. Instead, Mullin is openly proposing to allocate — or withhold — a basic federal service based on whether a city’s politics please him. Obey, or lose your airport. That’s not law enforcement. That’s a protection racket with a cabinet title.
And the people who’d pay first are the ones who always pay first. The immigrants in that Newark facility whose treatment sparked the protests. The travelers, citizens and noncitizens alike, who’d be stranded. The airport workers, the cargo handlers, the families waiting at arrivals. None of them get a vote in this. They’re just the leverage.
Sanctuary policies exist for a reason. They exist so that a mother can call the police when she’s assaulted without being deported for it, so that kids can go to school, so that local cops aren’t turned into an arm of ICE. Cities adopted them as a statement about who belongs and who deserves protection. Mullin’s answer is to make those cities suffer until they surrender.
He says he’s still just “drawing up plans.” Maybe it stays a threat. Maybe the World Cup, the courts, or his own colleagues stop it. But a man does not float the same atrocity for two months straight by accident. He’s testing what we’ll tolerate.
The answer should be: not this.
