Markwayne Mullin, the chief of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), has walked back a threat to pull all Customs and Border Protection officers from Newark International Airport in New Jersey due to clashes taking place at a nearby immigration detention facility known as Delaney Hall.
The threat to remove CBP officers from Newark Airport would have had an “immediate and profound” effect on global air connectivity and the local economy, the International Air Transportation Association (IATA) had warned in a letter to Mullin late last week after he first mooted the idea.
Mullin has repeatedly claimed that DHS is drawing up plans to remove CBP officers from airports in so-called ‘Sanctuary Cities’ and states, although no concrete policy has been unveiled, and the White House appears to be wary of the idea.
But ongoing protests at the Delaney Hall immigration center, run by a private company on behalf of ICE, had prompted Mullin to threaten the redeployment of CBP officers at Newark unless local officials didn’t do more to protect the facility.
Since Mullin made that threat last Thursday, the Democratic Governor of New Jersey, Mikie Sherrill, has ordered state police onto the front line at Delaney Hall, and a mandatory overnight curfew has been put in place.
Answering a question over whether DHS was still considering pulling CBP from Newark Airport, Mullin said on Monday: “As long as we continue to have this partnership with local and state law enforcement, then there’ll be no need to do so.”
IATA had warned Mullin that suspending CBP processing at Newark would “raise serious concerns among international partners about the United States’ reliability in upholding its aviation obligations, potentially inviting reciprocal actions or undermining decades of cooperative aviation policy.”
Newark is an important international and domestic hub for United Airlines, whose chief executive, Scott Kirby, has spent the past year trying to build close ties with the Trump administration.
Mullin’s wider threat to yank CBP from Sanctuary City airports would affect major international gateways in Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Philadelphia, as well as New York JFK.
The idea was first brought up by Mullin in a Fox News interview not long after he replaced Kristi Noem as Secretary of DHS.
Mullin said that if local officials in Sanctuary Cities aren’t cooperating with the federal government on immigration matters, then they don’t deserve to have CBP processing in place at their airports.
Last week, the U.S. aviation industry responded to that general threat with a trade body that represents carriers like United, along with American and Delta Air Lines, saying that it was urging DHS to “avoid actions that would create unnecessary operational and economic consequences for communities nationwide.”
