Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin used a solemn 9/11 commemoration Friday to deliver a pointed warning about sanctuary cities, arguing that jurisdictions refusing to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement create the exact conditions that allowed the 2001 terrorist attacks to happen.
Mullin spoke at the department’s Resilience Plaza to mark the 25th anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the flight that crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania after passengers fought back against hijackers. “On the one hand, it is a time of reflection. You look at 25 years of a day that all of us will remember,” Mullin said. “It changed our lives. And then in another way, it is obviously a time that we look at the success of the Department of Homeland Security, because for 25 years, we prevented it from happening again. But yet, the day still pisses me off. It still is so frustrating.”
Mullin went on to discuss the difficulty of protecting the homeland before pivoting sharply into a rebuke of sanctuary cities that refuse to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “It is tough to sometimes fight, and I’m not trying to get political here, but I will,” Mullin said, before laying out his case against sanctuary jurisdictions directly.
“Sanctuary cities, where they don’t want us to go into, and they’re harboring and abetting activities just like this. They can say it’s for humanitarian purposes, but the truth is, when you become a sanctuary city and you were not supporting law enforcement and you are not allowing law enforcement to do their job, it is a safe haven that incubates terrorist activity,” Mullin said. He added that the effects don’t stay contained to individual cities like Seattle, San Francisco, New York City, Boston, or Fairfax, Virginia, but instead “bleeds into other parts of the country.”
The remarks reflect the administration’s broader strategy of tying its aggressive immigration enforcement push directly to national security arguments, framing sanctuary policies not merely as a legal or political dispute but as a genuine security vulnerability comparable to the failures that preceded 9/11. Mullin’s comments come amid an ongoing nationwide battle between the Trump administration and Democrat-led cities over immigration enforcement cooperation, with the administration continuing to ramp up arrests and deportations of illegal immigrants, including those with criminal records, in jurisdictions that limit cooperation with federal authorities.