Director for Defense Oversight

With this series of updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past updates here.

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Sen. Mullin to replace Noem at DHS as partial shutdown continues: The Senate Homeland Security Committee approved the nomination of Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Oklahoma) to succeed Kristi Noem as secretary of Homeland Security. The nominee would take over at a time when Republicans are seeking to carry out their “mass deportation” strategy with a different tone and profile, as it has become unpopular. DHS remains partially shut down, meanwhile, as Democratic legislators demand reforms after a string of human rights abuses.

Timeline may slow for detention “warehouse” plan, while in-custody deaths skyrocket: Noem’s plan for a network of giant warehouses to store undocumented migrants in detention may slow a bit as the Department transitions to Mullin’s direction, but appears likely to continue despite much local opposition. 13 people have died in ICE’s regular detention system so far this year.

Concerns about oversight of DHS: It has now been a year since the Trump administration gutted internal oversight offices at DHS, making accountability more difficult to achieve. Regular reporting of data from DHS has declined sharply.

In the courts: The Supreme Court will hear arguments over the next month about TPS cancellations and about “metering” at ports of entry. Some Venezuelan men who were sent to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison without due process in March 2025 have filed a claim against DHS. Some of the Salvadoran men sent to the CECOT on that same day remain disappeared.

The border wall and natural areas: CBP appears to be backing off plans to build a border wall through Big Bend National Park in Texas, even as it inks a large wall-building contract in the region. Concerns of environmental harm from border barriers abound in Arizona’s San Rafael Valley and in the Rio Grande near Laredo.

Sen. Mullin to replace Noem at DHS as partial shutdown continues

President Donald Trump dismissed Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on March 5. On March 31, when she leaves after 14 months to serve as a “Special Envoy for the Shield of the Americas” initiative, Noem will be the first cabinet member to exit Trump’s administration. Trump named Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Oklahoma) as Noem’s replacement.

Noem’s tenure will be remembered for aggressive operations in U.S. cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis; incendiary and often untruthful rhetoric about migrants and people who defend them; frequent infighting within the Department; and numerous promotional videos and social media posts, often featuring Noem wearing the uniforms of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) law enforcement agencies, and once in front of people caged in a cell of El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) prison.

During Noem’s tenure, Nick Miroff wrote at the Atlantic, “I regularly heard from staffers—career law-enforcement officers and political appointees alike—who were desperate for a return to institutional normalcy. Their concerns weren’t ideological. They felt, instead, that Noem was running the department and its law-enforcement agencies as an attention-grabbing spectacle, undermining their mission.”

Former Trump campaign official Corey Lewandowski, Noem’s powerful advisor who was nominally a temporary “special government employee,” is expected to depart along with Noem. Noem and Lewandowski had forced out “more than a dozen” senior Customs and Border Protection (CBP) employees between October 2025 and February 2026, the Washington Examiner reported, in part due to a vendetta against CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott.

Sen. Mullin, the nominee, is a first-term senator and Trump loyalist who does not sit on the Homeland Security Committee or, though he is an appropriator, on the Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security. He is a former mixed martial arts fighter and the only senator who lacks a four-year degree, having dropped out of college to take over his family’s plumbing business. Media profiles describe him as “affable” and able to get along with Democrats, though they also note episodes of aggressive behavior, including a 2023 hearing in which the Senator challenged a witness to a fight.

On March 19 the Senate Homeland Security Committee approved Mullin’s nomination, sending it to the full Senate, with an 8-7 vote. Mullin had to depend on the support of one Democrat, Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pennsylvania), in a committee where Republicans hold an 8-7 majority, because the committee’s chairman, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), opposed the nomination.

Sen. Paul, a small-government libertarian who has opposed several of Trump’s spending, internal policing, and military intervention policies, confronted Mullin during his March 18 confirmation hearing over remarks that the nominee had made in February calling Paul a “freaking snake” and adding that he could “understand” why Paul’s neighbor assaulted him in 2017, breaking six of his ribs. “I just wonder if someone who applauds violence against their political opponents is the right person to lead an agency that has struggled to accept limits to the proper use of force,” Paul said.

While much coverage conveys a sense that DHS might be under a steadier hand with Mullin in charge, the Oklahoma Senator has made his share of controversial statements. After the January 24 killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Mullin told Fox News that the nurse was “a deranged individual who came in to cause massive damage with a loaded pistol.” Appearing on Fox Business with Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut), who said that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was “murdering U.S. citizens,” Mullin shot back, “Well, these American citizens are actually impeding federal officers from doing their job.”

Asked in December about the Trump administration’s lethal military strikes on boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, which have now killed 158 civilians on mere suspicion of drug trafficking, Mullin replied, “I have zero problems with sending them to the bottom of the ocean, and I hope they rot in hell for it because they know what they’re doing when they get on that boat and they’re trafficking the drugs to our streets.”

In the March 18 hearing, Mullin said that he regretted his words about the Minneapolis shootings, but avoided direct apologies, arguing that investigations were ongoing and that officers had faced split-second decisions.

Policy continuity, though perhaps a change in tone

The change in DHS leadership does not signal any pullback in the Trump administration’s “mass deportation” agenda, though it likely indicates a shift in how it will be carried out. “My goal in six months is that we’re not in the lead story every single day,” Mullin said at his hearing, evoking the lower-profile but bureaucratically adroit approach of White House “Border Czar” Tom Homan, an immigration hardliner who was rarely in contact with Noem and Lewandowski.

With Mullin in Noem’s former role, the White House is likely to be in firmer control of the day-to-day management of border and immigration enforcement. “The DHS Secretary may be the least important person shaping immigration policy right now,” former Obama and Biden official Andrea Flores wrote. “Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s immigration agenda, and border czar Tom Homan, a former ICE official, are the ones who wield true authority.” As a result, “Mullin’s job will simply be to execute Miller and Homan’s agenda.”

Miller, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff and arguably more hard-line on immigration policy than Homan or even Trump, “runs that department and will continue to run the department,” Sen. Chris Murphy told Reuters. Miller hosts daily 10 a.m. conference calls with DHS and other Cabinet agencies; last May, he imposed a daily quota of 3,000 arrests on ICE, a number the agency has not yet come close to reaching.

Even as the policies and top personnel remain similar, however, the administration and congressional Republicans are racing to improve the optics of a “mass deportation” agenda that has seen a collapse in public support.

As traumatic videos of ICE and CBP operations proliferate, along with accounts of mistreatment in custody, a Navigator Research poll showed Donald Trump’s approval rating on immigration policy plummeting from a net -3 percentage points last April to -17 now. “Support for Trump’s mass deportation plan has now flipped entirely. In January 2025, it held a net 10 approval. Today it sits at net -14. Three in five independents oppose it outright,” added Pablo Manríquez of Migrant Insider, who reported on the poll.

As the November midterm elections approach and their control of both chambers of Congress looks shakier, Republicans appear aware of the immigration crackdown’s unpopularity and are seeking to soften the tone.

The number-two item on the Trump campaign’s 2024 platform was “Carry Out the Largest Deportation Operation in American History.” But at a March 10 House Republican retreat in Doral, Florida, White House Deputy Chief of Staff James Blair privately urged legislators to stop emphasizing “mass deportations.” Blair urged a greater focus on removing the much smaller population of migrants with violent criminal records.

“We got a little hiccup with some of the Hispanic and Latino voters, for certain, because some of the immigration enforcement was viewed to be overzealous,” House Speaker Rep. Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) acknowledged. “But here’s the good news: We’re in a course correction mode right now.”

In Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) runs one of the hardest-line state-level immigration enforcement operations, six out of eight sheriffs on the governor’s “Immigration Enforcement Council” publicly broke with the administration, calling for better guidelines on deportation targeting and proposing civil fines, rather than removal, for non-criminal undocumented immigrants.

Far from Stephen Miller’s 3,000-per-day target, ICE arrests actually dropped 11 percent from January to February, down to 1,115 per day, the New York Times reported, as aggressive, showy Chicago- and Minneapolis-style enforcement offensives have abated. The population in ICE detention has dropped from over 70,000 in January to about 63,000 in March, according to internal data reviewed by The Atlantic’s Miroff.

On the right, Lora Ries, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center, urged the administration to stay the course in comments reported by Bloomberg Government. “The president ran on this in 2024. He promised mass deportations. It’s no time for some in the White House to go wobbly, or those on the Hill.”

Still, Mullin has signaled a willingness to walk back a few Noem-era policies.

The nominee told senators that he would instruct ICE agents not to enter residences without a judicial warrant, except in cases of hot pursuit. ICE has been using self-issued “administrative warrants” to enter homes when the agency believes that undocumented immigrants are inside. (“Kristi Noem acknowledged in her testimony in response to my questions that at least 28 break-ins have occurred,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) said during Mullin’s confirmation hearing.)

Mullin said that he has no 3,000-per-day quota to meet.

The nominee said he will not insist on personally signing off on all DHS contracts over $100,000, as Noem and Lewandowski did.

The most visible face of the Noem-era mass-deportation effort, Border Patrol Sector Chief Gregory Bovino, will be retiring from the agency at the end of March, the New York Times and CBS News reported. Bovino, who appeared to relish confronting protesters, was removed from his role as an “at-large commander” shortly after the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis in January. Still, Daniel Boguslaw wrote in an American Prospect analysis, “the reality is that an inner circle of Bovino allies continues to shape the agency’s incursion into the American heartland and its operational culture writ large.”

In Congress, offers and counteroffers

The Department of Homeland Security, meanwhile, has remained partially shut down since February 13, with nearly half of its workforce going without a paycheck. (ICE and CBP are funded, however, thanks to separate appropriations through the mammoth “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” that Congress passed last July.)

The partial closure is a consequence of the Minneapolis human rights crisis, which led Senate Democrats to demand reforms to DHS practices as a condition for their support for the Department’s DHS appropriation. (The filibuster rule requires 60 of 100 votes in the U.S. Senate to move legislation to a vote, which means that at least 7 Democratic senators would have to agree on a deal to end the shutdown.)

On March 17, Homan and White House Legislative Affairs Director James Braid sent a letter to top Senate Republican appropriators outlining five concessions that the administration would be willing to make: expanded body-worn cameras, limiting enforcement at sensitive locations, visible officer identification, adherence to existing law permitting unannounced congressional oversight visits to detention facilities, and—notably offered as a concession—pledging not to deport U.S. citizens, as already mandated by law.

Democrats rejected this offer as falling too far short of a list of 10 reform demands issued in February. “We’re trying to move a little bit, but they’ve got to get serious,” Minority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-New York) said. “They are not getting serious.” Two of these are just pledges to follow the law,” noted the Cato Institute’s David Bier. Critics also pointed out that the White House offer would allow agents to continue using face masks during operations and would not mandate that body-worn cameras be turned on, or that footage be stored and made accessible.

Timeline may slow for detention “warehouse” plan, while in-custody deaths skyrocket

If confirmed by the Senate, Mullin will inherit Noem’s $38 billion plan to convert ICE’s network of detention centers into a 34-facility plan based on giant shipping warehouses converted to hold human beings. Once implemented, this plan would allow the agency to detain at least 92,000 people at a time; ICE currently has a capacity of........

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