Newly-appointed Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin floated a new way in an interview on Fox News to punish cities that don't agree to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement round up residents for mass deportation: strip staffing from their international ports of entry.
"I believe sanctuary cities is (sic) not lawful," Mullin told Fox News' Bret Baier. "Some of these cities have international airports. If they are a sanctuary city, should they really be processing customs into their city? We need to have a really hard look at that."
"So you are saying that big cities that are sanctuary cities that have a big airport, they might lose their customs?" said Baier.
"I'm going to be forced to make tough decisions," said Mullin, also noting that this could serve as retaliation for cities whose lawmakers have obstructed funding for DHS in the standoff over ICE reforms.
Mullin's threat here was met with instant outrage on social media, with experts pointing out he doesn't actually have the authority to do this.
"In case you [were] wondering if he wasn’t going to be a complete corrupt partisan official like Noem," wrote David J. Bier, Director of Immigration Studies for the libertarian Cato Institute.
"There is no statutory authority allowing those resources to be withheld by the feds," wrote congressional reporter Jamie Dupree. "Courts have ruled multiple times against such Trump Administration efforts to punish 'sanctuary' cities."
"These people are absolutely nuts," Thomas Kennedy, a policy analyst at the Florida Immigrant Coalition, posted on X. "They are willing to nuke the economy of large metropolitan centers for a political agenda repulsive to 70+ percent of the population."