Democrats spent Memorial Day weekend physically barricading ICE agents inside a Newark detention facility.
Now DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin is drawing up plans that could cut those same sanctuary cities off from the international economy.
Read that again – the cities that spent years declaring themselves off-limits to federal law enforcement are about to find out what it costs when the federal government returns the favor.
Mullin Drops the Hammer on Fox News
On Tuesday, Mullin sat down with Sean Hannity and laid it out in plain language.
"In these sanctuary cities where the local radical left Democrats aren't allowing us to do our jobs and enforce federal laws," Mullin said, "we shouldn't be processing international flights into their cities either."
The logic is airtight.
If Chicago, Los Angeles, Newark, San Francisco, and Seattle want to refuse federal immigration cooperation, they can also lose the federal customs officers who make international air travel possible.
No CBP agents means no customs processing.
No customs processing means it's illegal for international flights to land.
No international flights means the economy of every one of those sanctuary cities takes a direct hit – measured not in millions but in billions.
Newark's airport handled 24.5 million international passengers last year.
Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York together processed more than 50 million.
The U.S. Travel Association immediately called the prospect "devastating" – which tells you exactly how much leverage Mullin just put on the table.
Democrats Started This Fight at Delaney Hall
This didn't happen in a vacuum.
Over Memorial Day weekend, New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill and Sen. Andy Kim led Democrat politicians and leftist protesters to Delaney Hall – the ICE detention facility in Newark – and turned it into a siege.
ICE agents were barricaded inside.
Local police declined to intervene.
Mullin didn't flinch.
He told reporters that detainees refusing to eat weren't staging a hunger strike – they were demanding food that met their specific ethnic preferences.
Then he went on Hannity and announced the airport plan.
The message to Newark's political class was direct: you blocked our agents, we'll block your flights.
Why This Move Is Smarter Than a Funding Fight
Democrats have one move when Trump squeezes them: run to a friendly judge.
It worked on the funding fight – a San Francisco court blocked every attempt to pull grant money from sanctuary jurisdictions, and Democrats celebrated like they'd won the war.
They hadn't.
Mullin doesn't need a judge's permission to pull his own agents.
CBP deployment is a DHS decision, full stop – no congressional vote, no court approval, no injunction waiting to happen.
Democrats can file all the lawsuits they want, and by the time any ruling comes down, the World Cup will be over and the damage will be done.
The Pressure Is Working and They Know It
Democrats wouldn't be this frantic if the pressure weren't landing.
They spent months comparing ICE to the Gestapo, organizing protesters to block federal agents, and passing resolutions declaring their cities off-limits to immigration enforcement.
They assumed the federal government would blink.
Mullin isn't blinking.
https://twitter.com/SecMullinDHS/status/2060083886571258046?s=20
Airlines for America – the trade group representing every major U.S. carrier – already called the plan devastating for the airline and tourism industries.
That means airline executives are now calling Democrat mayors asking them to knock it off.
Business leaders who funded Democratic campaigns are suddenly discovering that protecting criminal aliens has a price tag.
This is exactly how leverage works.
The World Cup starts June 11, with matches scheduled in Denver, Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, and San Francisco – every one of them a sanctuary jurisdiction.
International visitors will arrive expecting to be processed through those airports.
If Democrat mayors want to keep it that way, they know what they have to do.
The cities that spent years declaring themselves sanctuaries from federal law just found out the federal government has something they can't do without.
And right now, Mullin controls it.
Sources:
- Markwayne Mullin, Interview with Sean Hannity, Fox News, May 27, 2026.
- "DHS Threatens to Stop International Flight Processing in Sanctuary Cities," Time, May 27, 2026.
- "Mullin Weighs Using Airport Customs as Leverage Against Sanctuary Cities," Fox News, April 8, 2026.
- "DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin Signals Closer Scrutiny of Customs at Major Sanctuary City Airports," Fox News, April 6, 2026.
- "International Flights Could Stop in Sanctuary Cities," NewsNation, May 28, 2026.
- "Weeks Before the World Cup, Trump Officials Threaten Flights to NJ Over ICE Protests," NJ1015, May 28, 2026.