DHS confirms record month of arrests amid criticism of Mullin

A senior U.S. Department of Homeland Security official Tuesday evening confirmed to WORLD that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 51,000 people in July. The official explained that the number was an all-time record for ICE. The arrest record for July follows a record-setting roughly 43,000 arrests in June, according to data published on ICE’s website.

The data about record levels of arrests comes amid criticisms of Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin. Some prominent conservative commentators, such as retired Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino, have argued Mullin is soft on illegal immigration. They focused on comments he made this past weekend at a National Governors Association meeting. Mullin said the federal government should look into potentially making some seasonal agricultural worker visas into permanent visas. He also argued that immigrant labor didn’t prevent Americans from participating in every sector of the workforce, only some. He also implied that immigrants who’d overstayed their visas but attended their court hearings and followed the law might be able to stay in the United States.

Other conservative voices earlier told WORLD that Mullin should stay focused on delivering on the mass deportations voters requested at the polls back in November 2024.

• Oversight Project Visiting Fellow for Deportation Studies Scott Mechkowski: “Expanding permanent work visas is not immigration enforcement. It is labor policy, and it is the wrong one given where American workforce participation sits. The Secretary’s job is to enforce the law and remove people here illegally, not to make the case for a bigger permanent pipeline of foreign labor. Stay focused!”

• Jennica Pounds, who runs the DataRepublican website: “People voted in November for mass deportations, and a DHS secretary publicly making the growth case for foreign labor is going to read as backing off the mandate. He [Mullin] caught it himself and posted the fix: ‘NO amnesty for illegal aliens. Ever.’ Good. But the only way you hold a DHS secretary to that line is with the removal numbers, not a social media post. Publish it. Current count, monthly trend. If enforcement is accelerating, the NGA [National Governors Association] remark was a stray line and there's no story here. The data settles the debate, and right now nobody outside DHS can see it.”

Dig deeper: Read my report in The Sift about how U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services will no longer interview many asylum applicants before sending them to a more adversarial hearing on their asylum claims in immigration courts.