ICE Crackdown Intensifies Despite Recent Killings, Mullin Says: ‘Turning Up The Heat On The Streets’
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said Immigration and Customs Enforcement is ramping up street-level enforcement, despite intense backlash to two killings by ICE officers in less than a week in Maine and Texas.
Mullin said “we’re turning up the heat on the streets” during a press conference Friday when asked by a reporter how agents who violated use of force policy would be held accountable.
Mullin did say he is “trying to remove us from the headlines every single day,” adding, “everybody will be held accountable, I don’t pick and choose which laws I’m going to enforce, I enforce our nation’s laws, that means I’ll enforce it with our own agency and I’ll enforce it with the criminals on the streets. That’s my assurance.”
Mullin made the statements during a press conference announcing new election-related measures following President Donald Trump’s speech Thursday claiming vulnerabilities in the U.S. elections system despite much evidence.
Mullin said DHS’s cybersecurity division would release a plan to enhance security of elections infrastructure within the next 30 days and claimed, without saying how, DHS had identified 250,000 non-U.S. citizens registered to vote in California, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Nevada.
Such estimates of publicly available state voter records tend to inflate alleged numbers of noncitizens on voter rolls, according to The New York Times, citing the nonprofit, nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, which noted recently that “most often, investigations into large claims reveal that at least some early flags were based on outdated, incomplete, or improperly matched data that incorrectly labeled eligible citizens as possible noncitizens.”
“If you’re illegal and attempted to vote or you tried to vote illegally for someone else, we will find you and we will charge you,” Mullin said, though cases of noncitizens voting are historically rare and have never been drastic enough to change the results of an election.
Mullin’s comments follow two fatal ICE shootings of Joan Sebatian Duran Guerrero, in Biddeford, Maine, on Monday, and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston on July 7. Neither were ICE’s intended targets for enforcement activity, DHS has said. Duran Guerrero, a Colombian national, was authorized to work in the U.S., while Araujo, who is from Mexico and was undocumented, was a business owner who had lived in the U.S. for 35 years. Both were shot while driving, prompting ICE to say it would pause traffic stops, though Trump quickly intervened to reverse the policy after criticism from his base.
Trump delivered a prime-time speech Thursday rehashing old claims about foreign interference in the 2020 election, though he stopped short of repeating his unfounded allegation that the election was stolen from him. He alleged China obtained hundreds of millions of U.S. voter files and the so-called “deep state” hid the allegations from him. He declassified some investigative materials related to the claims, but none of the documents contain any new details that change previous intelligence findings about China’s mostly failed attempts to meddle in U.S. elections. He also reiterated his push for the Senate to pass a new law requiring documentary proof of citizenship to vote, known as the SAVE Act. The Senate does not have the Democratic votes it needs to clear the 60-vote filibuster threshold to pass the law.