Trump’s New DHS Secretary Threatens to Halt International Flight Processing at Blue City Airports as Punishment for Allowing Anti-ICE Protests at Detention Camps

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin announced he is “drawing up plans” to end the processing of international flights at airports in left-leaning cities, citing protests outside an immigration detention facility in Newark, New Jersey—protests at which Democratic Sen. Andy Kim was pepper-sprayed by officers. The threat arrives just weeks before the FIFA World Cup brings millions of international visitors to the United States.

The Hill reports:

“[T]hese sanctuary cities where the local radical-left Democrats aren’t allowing us to do our jobs and enforce federal laws,” Mullin said, “then we shouldn’t be processing international flights into their cities either.”

Critics said ending the processing of international flights at various airports would cause chaos at airports across the country, forcing airlines to cancel flights and disrupt travel for left- and right-leaning cities that depend on CBP processing at major hubs.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, called the idea “actively insane.” “Airlines cannot divert large numbers of international flights from one city to another,” he wrote. “They’d just have to cancel flights en masse, causing enormous economic damage that splashed waaaaay beyond a few big cities that were the target.”

Halting international flight processing at major airports would inflict enormous collateral damage on ordinary travelers, businesses, and the broader economy—none of whom are responsible for the protests Mullin objects to. More fundamentally, using a core governmental service as a weapon against political dissent is precisely the kind of retaliatory executive action that the constitutional design of limited government was meant to prevent. The administration is treating airport customs processing as a bargaining chip to punish cities for harboring residents who protest its policies.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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