On Thursday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends,” DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said that he isn’t planning to pull customs processing from all sanctuary cities, just in situations like in Newark where local law enforcement won’t protect the streets around federal facilities.
While discussing the situation in Newark, Mullin said that if local law enforcement isn’t allowed to protect the streets around facilities, “then we’ve got to prioritize federal police officers, and that may affect international flights coming in and out of their airport, because I’m going to have to pull Custom[s] and Border Protection officers out of being to able process international flights and put them helping our ICE agents. And, by the way, if you can’t process international flights because customs is closed, you can’t, obviously, process international flights coming in from out of the country.”
Co-host Brian Kilmeade then asked, “You’re drawing up plans to halt international flights to anywhere there are sanctuary cities, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles. So, no more international flights to those airports?”
Mullin answered, “No. I wouldn’t say all of them. I’m saying when we have situations [like] what’s happening in New Jersey right now, when we have to prioritize where we put federal employees because local law enforcement won’t help protect their streets, not federal streets, city streets, and keep them from barricading and causing harm to our employees, then we have to decide where we’re going to prioritize our federal employees. So, we’re not going to halt the flights. What we’re saying is, we just won’t be able to process them because we don’t have officers there, we’re going to pull out our Custom[s] and Border Patrol officers that process these flights and put them in these facilities to help protect our employees coming in and out of work. And, by the way, that’s not their job. Their job is to do just what they said, Custom[s] and Border Protection. However, since local law enforcement isn’t able to do their job, because they said, quote, they don’t have the resources, well, we have to prioritize our resources as well.”
Mullin added that, in Newark, “If things don’t change, we’re going to have to make this step pretty quick.”
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