Mullin appeared before senators on Wednesday for his confirmation hearing, where he faced questions over his vision for a department tasked with rounding up people who have entered the country illegally, particularly those who have committed violent crimes.
“I can have different opinions with everybody in this room, but as secretary of Homeland I’ll be protecting everybody,” Mullin told a packed room. “My goal in six months is that we’re not in the lead story every single day.”
The hearing is Mullin’s first opportunity since being nominated to publicly present his plans for the third-largest department in the Cabinet. The sprawling department, with a workforce of roughly 260,000 employees, oversees a diverse mission set of responsibilities ranging from protecting the president from a bullet to helping states recover from disasters to deporting people in the country illegally.
In his opening remarks, he emphasized the need to restore funding to DHS.
“We have to get DHS funded. We have to, my friends. We have to set the partisan side down. And we have to realize that we’re putting our homeland and the peace of mind at risk for the American people,” Mullin told senators.
He praised the DHS employees working without pay: "We should all be trying to fund them.”
