WASHINGTON — Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin told Breitbart News exclusively that deportation numbers in 2026 will very soon outpace all of 2025, and that agents from across the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) are removing illegal aliens from the United States interior at record rates.
“We’re on a path this year — ’26 — to well past what we did in ’25,” Mullin told Breitbart News in a wide-ranging conversation at DHS headquarters. “I mean, our numbers are in fact — within, I’d say probably, within the next six weeks we’ll probably pass what we deported in all of ’25. What we’re going to do in ’26, maybe two months, I think we’ll definitely do it within two months but should be probably six weeks at the current rate.”
As for how DHS is accomplishing this, Mullin said it is by focusing on those who have criminal records or final orders of deportation from judges — and oftentimes, he said, the federal agents will find several other illegal aliens being harbored in the same homes and they arrest them and deport them too.
“So, what we’re doing is, we’re looking at the worst of the worst,” Mullin said. “We’re going after people that have already had final orders, meaning that they’ve already had final orders from a judge that says, “Hey, you got to go, you’ve already went through the appeal process, and you didn’t show up for your last court [appearance], so you’ve got to go.’ We’re going after people that have felonies, that have active felonies on them. We’re going after individuals that have been released from state penitentiaries that had already served their time but they’re still in the country illegally. So, now we’re getting a warrant out for their arrest because they’re no longer allowed to stay inside the country because they violated either their parole or they violated their agreement with the United States by allowing them to come in through the visa program—and then we’re going after the individuals that have claimed asylum cases, and asylum cases are ones that they said that they need asylum because they’re scared of their country. The case went in front of a judge. A judge says, ‘No, you don’t comply,’ or they just flat didn’t show up. When we’re going after these individuals, we have warrants for them. We’re serving them when we find them. Very seldom are they ever by themselves. In fact, usually there’s three to four other occupants, individuals, with them that are also illegal, so we’re picking up the one and we run into them having three or four [others]—actually it’s just an average of over four with them at the same time and we arrest those individuals too. So our arrests are on track, our deportations are way up, and we’re going to continue to go after the worst of the worst. That’s our focus. We’re trying to get the criminals off our streets.”
Mullin’s interview with Breitbart News came just ahead of his 100-day mark as Secretary, which is coming up on Thursday. He was thrown into the job suddenly after President Donald Trump reassigned now former Secretary Kristi Noem to focus on Latin American affairs. Mullin, a former U.S. senator, had a quick confirmation to the job from the U.S. Senate and started earlier this spring. A previously published portion of this interview focused on Mullin’s efforts to secure the World Cup soccer tournament, but this deeper interview looks at how he is doing since he became Secretary and specifically immigration enforcement matters.
“I still love it. I still, every single day I walk in, I think I’m still the luckiest man in the world,” Mullin told Breitbart News when asked about the 100-day mark looming. “I wouldn’t trade my position with anybody—not another cabinet member. I really legitimately enjoy it. I get to protect the homeland, right? It’s a mission that everybody that work works here can get behind.”
Mullin explained how wide-ranging the mandate at DHS really is, and how the Department has 22 different components focused on all sorts of security and law enforcement.
“So yes, we have 22 components — every one of those 22 components has some aspect of protecting our interest, our homeland, not just the lower 48 but all of us, all the Americas,” Mullin said. “And so, we get the special privilege of protecting my own backyard and yours, regardless if you agree with me or you don’t agree with me. So, every day we’re also looking to prove that there are some changes that need to be made, and we’re working on those changes. There’s definitely improvements every single day. We get in here and say, how can we do it better every single day? We prevent something from taking place. We work with all of our, all the other secretaries. There’s not another agency or cabinet position that works across the board. Because we have 22 components, we work with the State Department, we work with DOW, we work with DOJ, we work with the EPA, we work with Agriculture, we work with Commerce and Treasury, and the list goes on. So you’re never bored, you’re never running out of things to do, and I mean this when I say it: I don’t think I’ve slept in 100 days, but I don’t think the president has slept in 80 years because the guy never stops. And so, getting to work with him on a daily basis has been amazing. Ever since I was a kid, I had mentors in my life, right? Somebody that’s achieved something that was setting an example that I wanted to get to. So, my dad had a ridiculous work ethic and completely honestly, I mean, one thing you didn’t do is you never lied to dad. The second thing you never did is you never told dad you couldn’t because he didn’t allow excuses. Then I had a football coach, Bill Scott, that was an amazing mentor of mine, with sports and dedication and education, and then when I got into, got into business, I had a guy named Darrell Baskin that really showed me advertising, a guy named Amos that showed me how to actually structure your bills. I know that sounds funny, but I was young. But how do you pay back? How do you pay the bills and structure it in a form to which you can still invest and set up your accounts with a way they need to be set up?… Then, when I got into politics, I had Kevin McCarthy, who was at that time the Whip, who took me underneath his wing. When I got in the Senate, I had John Thune that took me underneath his wing, and now I have President Trump, which is amazing, right? There’s no one with a better work ethic. There’s no one that manages and able to recruit talent like President Trump can, and get people to believe in his vision. So, in this position, I feel like I’m still growing. In 100 days, it felt like — I honestly, when I heard it was 100 days when we were walking in about ready to do this interview I thought wait it feels like it’s been just a few weeks.”
Since taping this long-form interview on Tuesday with Breitbart News at DHS HQ, Mullin has been very active. He got into heated altercations with Democrats like Rep. Rosa DeLauro (CT) during a congressional hearing on Capitol Hill and fought with CNN’s Jake Tapper on live television. But again, during this interview, he made clear the work is the focus and one of the biggest things he is trying to do at DHS is expand more local and state law enforcement departments into joining the 287(g) program with the federal government.
“The 287(g) program says that, ‘hey, if you’ll help us just simply hold the individual when you pull them, I don’t need you to do immigration enforcement, but because you’re out there and you’re in the streets, you’re in the community, you’re going to run into them anyway,’” Mullin said, noting that state and local police departments as well as sheriff’s departments nationwide regularly encounter illegal aliens. “If you can join on the 287(g) program, then you can make that arrest right there on that on the spot.”
Mullin said cops nationwide regularly encounter illegal aliens in the course of law enforcement activities, and by working with federal authorities they can ease immigration enforcement significantly.
“Say they pull over a traffic stop or public disturbance or a public intoxication, or they bust a house because they’re serving a warrant and there’s some illegals there, there’s illegal activity at businesses, just anything in day-to-day operations,” Mullin said. “There isn’t anybody that touches the public more than the sheriff’s department and local PDs and state police, right? The state police, and so when they’re part of the 287(g) program, they can partner with us, and guess what? When they partner with us, we reimburse. We’ll reimburse you for equipment. We reimburse the time of the officer. If you actually want to help and partner with us to serve warrants, we’ll actually pay for those officers’ full salary for you to go through. In small municipalities, smaller states, they can add officers because they can buy new equipment, they can buy drones, they can buy vehicles, and we help them, because we’ve got a huge influx of illegals that’s in this country, and some of them — yes some of them want to work — but 70 percent of the individuals we arrest on a daily basis with immigration enforcement have either pending felony charges or they’ve already had felony charges and a huge percent of those have been released already from sanctuary cities and sanctuary states. We’re like, ‘why are we having to use taxpayer dollars twice to catch this bad guy?’ If you would just simply partner with us with the 287(g) program, which we’ll pay you for, we’ll come pick them up and then they’re not back on the streets, they’re not threatening anybody on the streets. One death from an illegal is 100 percent preventable. One death, and just in Tennessee alone, we’ve had over 41 deaths in the last 12 months from an illegal, from people that were here in this country illegally. Fifty percent of all the deaths that have happened in Fairfax County, [Virginia,] just down the road from here — 50 percent committed by illegals. We should all be working together to get these individuals out of our streets. If you’re not in this country legally, there’s a legal process for that to take place. You can fill out the paperwork and do it legally, but we have laws in this nation and we must enforce those, and if you’re willing to break one, you’re willing to break others.”
Mullin mentioned earlier in the interview that his work with some sanctuary cities and states during the World Cup security process has possibly opened some doors in terms of potentially working together on 287(g) immigration enforcement down the road with them. Asked if there are more states and localities joining the program, Mullin told Breitbart News there are countless examples of local law enforcement even in blue states like California or New Jersey wanting to team up with DHS to help in the 287(g) program to remove criminal illegal aliens from their communities.
“I’ll just use these couple examples here — Florida, and Oklahoma do the best job at enforcing the 287(g) program and partnering with us,” Mullin said. “In fact, the state that makes the most arrests under the 287(g) program, and that we put the most money toward, is Florida. The second state is Oklahoma. Now, there’s a huge difference in the population base there but because we have such a large percentage of participation in Oklahoma with the 287(g) program, from counties to cities, small municipalities to large cities to our state, we’re able to work great or closer as a partnership and we’re able to get the criminals off our streets. When you have states like California or New Jersey or Virginia that become a sanctuary state, what we find is almost every police chief and almost every sheriff wants to participate with us but because we have these lunatic left-leaning sanctuary city politicians that are more interested in protecting the criminals than they are law-abiding citizens, their hands are tied and it makes it very difficult. So, say there’s an illegal that has served their time in the state penitentiary and they’re being released. They should be deported immediately. The sanctuary states won’t even participate with us. They won’t even let us know that this individual is being released on the street, and they’ll literally turn this person right out back into the streets — or say they’re in a county jail and some liberal prosecuting attorney decided to drop the charges or say some liberal judge that decided to release the individual with no money bail, just release them on their own recognizance, even though they have a litany of felony charges, or of charges that’s been charged on them, they still release them on the streets. Well, what could be happening is they can say, ‘Hey, listen, we’re not going to charge them, but they’re here illegally. You have information on this individual that you want to pick up. So, can you come pick them up?’ We’d simply pick them up, and then take it off the state’s hands and put them back in our hands. But unfortunately, these sanctuary cities, they’re not participating with us.”
Mullin also told Breitbart News that the long-awaited border wall that Trump campaigned on in 2016 and started building in his first term — but that now former President Joe Biden halted during his term — is nearing completion after Trump restarted construction in his second term.
“From the Pacific to the Gulf of America this time next year, considering things continue the path they are, we will have the primary wall complete,” Mullin told Breitbart News. “Now, that doesn’t mean a secondary wall. So we have a wall system that we’re putting in place, because what happened underneath the Trump 45 was we realized where we had some of the walls the cartels were cutting it and simply going through because they were in very remote areas and we didn’t have sensors on the walls. Now we have a wall system where it’s a smart system, plus a primary wall and a secondary wall — and the secondary wall sometimes is between 60 to 150 feet apart from each other. So even if they cut the first wall, they’ve got to get into the wall system, they’re still not free to go yet, right? They still got to go through another system, and at that time we have sensors all on the walls and on the ground, where we know where they’re at, and we can get to them much faster, so we have a lot less got-aways. We can identify who they are and deploy. Not every place from the Pacific to the Gulf of America is going to have a physical wall — some it will be smart walls, which will have monitors on, because they’re so remote and in such a hard place to get to that even if somebody got there and walked across it would take them a long time to get to where they need to go. We’ll be able to put a drone in the sky and be able to locate that individual so where they come out to where they are going to be able to be picked up, we’ll be able to be there to pick them up and send them back.”
As for the border numbers, the total number of illegal aliens successfully crossing the border now into the United States is essentially zero.
“We’ve released no one into this country that we’ve apprehended,” Mullin said. “Everybody that — we went 13 months straight here now that we haven’t released one single person into the United States. We have some got-aways that we know because we have some holes in the wall. Yet, and every time we put pressure on one part of the wall, they go someplace else, but that number is in the single digits that we usually would say that there might have been a got-away, or there was a got-away on there, but those are individuals that we didn’t get to because the wall is not complete.”
Mullin also said that in addition to apprehending alleged terrorists he wants to secure the northern border too.
“So far with President Trump’s second term, we’ve arrested just over 1,900 terrorists,” Mullin said. “Yes, those were let in by the Biden administration. These aren’t individuals we’ve caught at the border, these are individuals that are in the interior. So, this is us working with FBI, with HSI, with local law enforcement, with ICE, with CBP — all of us working together to protect our homeland. That’s crazy, if you think about that — that’s how many were in this country. Now, the biggest influx we see happening right now is on our northern border. So, our northern border is a little more than 5,400 miles, and it’s a very, very, very rural area. But it’s 5,400 miles, and I say on the northern border, probably the largest nationality that we’re picking up — which is very small — I’m talking about we got single digits that we picked up there, is from Iran. But we see an influx, for instance, over FIFA with the World Cup coming in, we saw a little bit of an influx picking up when I say we’re arresting three or four a week — which isn’t a huge influx but it’s still three or four that we’re having to keep from getting to this country. There’s a reason why they’re entering this country illegally but they’re trying to expose our northern border. So, we’re working with a minister there, my counterpart in Canada, to really try shoring that up.”
Mullin said the Canadians are helping because they “don’t want this activity in their country either.” That being said, Mullin said the drug cartels are trying now to exploit the northern border to get drugs into the United States.
“We see the cartels, because President Trump’s policies have been so effective on our southern border, we’ve seen now they’ve started trying to get into Canada and try to enter the country that way but Canada is proving to be a pretty good partner in some of these areas,” Mullin said. “They’re having to learn — this is new to them and in the minister’s defense, he’s asking, ‘How we can we partner better? How can we work better on this?’ Because they don’t want it in their backyard either. But it’s still a huge issue. It’s the biggest threat we have. Unfortunately, we had four years of an open border through the Biden administration that we’re still trying to locate these individuals. We don’t know where they’re at. Keep in mind, we’re still looking for 300,000 children. I mean, there was 450,000 children that were unaccounted for when we came into office — that was let in by, that was just gave to sponsors and I use that term very loosely. Underneath the Biden administration, four years, 450,000 hadn’t been located. We’ve located over 147,000 now, and not all of them have been in great condition. We had some of the most horrific stories you can think of and we still got 300,000 more to find. That’s just children. That’s not talking about the bad guys. So, we got a lot of cleanup to do.”
