Over the weekend, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin committed the ultimate sin in the eyes of MAGA personalities, triggering vicious attacks and even calls for his ouster. What was this grave transgression? Well, Mullin dared to suggest that if handled correctly, immigration can be made to work in the national interest, which is something MAGA cannot permit to be true or uttered anywhere in public.
That’s not how these MAGA figures put it, of course. Instead, they’re claiming Mullin revealed that he’s falling woefully short of Donald Trump’s promise of mass deportations. But if you scratch the surface of this dustup, it lays bare the true ideological aims of the MAGA white nationalist project with unusual vividness—and exposes a deep political weakness in the whole Trump-MAGA immigration agenda.
Mullin’s comments came during a meeting on Saturday of the bipartisan National Governors Association in Oklahoma. In a long monologue, Mullin talked about why immigration reform is so hard, then discussed the need for changes to visa processes that currently facilitate seasonal labor even as much farmwork is now year-round.
“If we’re looking to grow our economy, then we need to look at making more permanent solutions on this,” Mullin said, adding that the “narrative” that immigrants steal Americans’ jobs is “not true for all industries,” such as agriculture. Mullin added:
It is America First. We want to take care of Americans first. It’s our economy. It’s our homeland. But there’s a way to utilize labor where we’re not having the participation rate where we need to. And we can plug those holes.
These remarks triggered extraordinary offense among MAGA figures. Fox News personality Tomi Lahren raged that Mullin is out to “appease liberal media.” Laura Loomer called on Trump to fire Mullin immediately. Podcasters Steve Bannon and Jack Posobiec both told Politico that MAGA wants Trump to replace Mullin with someone who, as Posobiec put it, “puts deportations first.”
The key tell here lies in what Mullin actually said. By “utilize labor” to “plug holes,” Mullin meant we should make it easier for migrant workers to fill currently unfilled jobs, particularly in agriculture. In other words, Mullin let slip a very dirty secret indeed: By reforming governing processes, we can broaden legal pathways for immigrants to work in the United States in ways that would benefit our economy and our country.
Ask yourself this: Why exactly does MAGA cast this suggestion as a threat to the broader project of mass deportations? It’s not as if Mullin’s Department of Homeland Security has backed down on them: Migrant detentions just hit a new high, arrests have surged, and deportations appear to be escalating.
What’s actually threatening to the MAGA project, then, is the underlying idea that Mullin endorsed: that immigration can be made to function in the national interest—and more to the point, that the right reforms actually can accomplish this and make it a reality.
A darkly amusing cycle has kicked in here. The Trump administration keeps accidentally admitting that more immigration can indeed benefit our economy—and then quickly suppressing that truth when MAGA erupts over it.
In June 2025, for instance, Trump openly declared that due to mass deportations—his own policy—the agriculture and hospitality industries were losing many “good” and “longtime” workers, and he pledged to carve out deportation exceptions for them. But Stephen Miller quickly prevailed on Trump to reverse the decision—just as MAGA is now raging at Mullin for making a similar suggestion.
It’s easy to see why this keeps happening: The admission wrecks MAGA mythology on a very deep level. A core MAGA idea is that mass purgings of immigrants are needed because they take the jobs of Americans, of course. But the deeper idea here is that this deprives young American men of good, honest, breadwinning work, leaving them moldering away in left-behind areas of the heartland.
In short, immigrants are a primary cause of the social crisis afflicting young MAGA men. Indeed, this social crisis has been deliberately engineered by liberal elites—it’s a key component of the “great replacement” of MAGA America with the “Third World.” In this story, mass deportations and putting the brakes on mass unskilled immigration should mean all these young American men will come stampeding into new jobs left vacant by now-deported invaders, and their families and communities will flourish.
But it isn’t happening. Paul Krugman recently illustrated that this economic story is now in shambles:
The virtual end of net immigration hasn’t led to a boom in jobs for the native-born. Growth in the working-age population has stalled, but so has job creation, and the employment rate for native-born adults is lower, not higher, than it was before the pogroms began.
Meanwhile, studies have found that recent surges in mass deportations have cost Americans jobs in local economies without boosting wages for the native-born.
Indeed, if anything, Mullin’s admission was far too narrow. He insisted immigrants are taking American jobs in some areas (a story that, again, is simply unsupported), while allowing that in agriculture, deportations are hurting the economy.
Yet even this qualified admission triggered MAGA. Because every time someone like Mullin effectively admits, even in a limited way, that deporting immigrant laborers is not resulting in more work for Americans—that creating more legal pathways would boost the economy—it casts doubt on the larger MAGA ruse behind it all.
It’s the coup de grâce that Mullin described his suggestions as the actual “America First” stance. I suspect he doesn’t grasp just how dangerous a heresy this truly is. After all, it neatly exposes MAGA’s real position: Mass deportations must be carried out even if they hurt the economy. Mullin must “put deportations first”—that is, he must put them before economic concerns. The goal is not primarily an economic one: It’s about ethnically purging the country.
Trump’s deportations are badly underwater in polls, including in swing states. If more voters understood the actual Trump-MAGA position to be that deportations must be maximized regardless of their economic impact—that maximal removals are preferable to having a better economy—Americans would recoil even more. No wonder MAGA wants Mullin to shut up and stop giving away its vile scam in public.
