Bill O’Reilly wants Markwayne Mullin shipped off to a beach chair in the Bahamas after Republicans got steamrolled in the midterms.
Democrats are already cheering every crack in the deportation machine.
And Donald Trump once caught Mullin doing something O’Reilly never bothered to mention.
Bill O’Reilly Reads the Charge Sheet Upside Down
O’Reilly lit into the Homeland Security Secretary on No Spin News while walking viewers through Trump’s post-election sit-down with Ross Douthat on 60 Minutes.
He didn’t pull a single punch. “So while Tom Homan did his best and I respect him, this Markwayne Mullin guy couldn’t have been worse,” O’Reilly said. “He’s worse than [Kristi Noem]! Never explained, arrogant as hell.”
Then he booked the trip. “I mean, if it were me, Mullin would be in the Bahamas right now taking the sun,” he said.
O’Reilly’s theory runs like this. ICE got too rough, Latino voters noticed, Mullin never explained himself, and Republicans paid for it at the ballot box.
But that theory gets the Secretary exactly backward.
Mullin, a former Oklahoma senator, took over DHS in March after Trump fired Noem. Too much toughness was never his weakness. Look at the record, and the trouble points in the opposite direction.
The Summer Order That Pulled ICE Off the Road
Go back to July 2026. ICE officers fatally shot two men during vehicle stops in Maine and Texas within a single week. In the Maine case, the state attorney general’s office said the driver tried to flee in the direction of the officer.
Mullin’s answer was to take ICE off the road.
He gave the directive to halt vehicle stops, a law enforcement source told ABC News. A senior ICE official then emailed deportation officers and told them to stop “immediately.” “All personnel are instructed to prioritize other existing operational methods, outside of vehicle stops, to conduct immigration enforcement activities,” the official wrote.
ICE sources told Fox News the pause had no end date. Agents could still pull over the most egregious targets with serious or violent records. Everybody else got a pass until Mullin signed off on new training and that training reached the field.
Think about what that looks like on the ground. Illegal aliens with final removal orders drive to work like everyone else. Take away the traffic stop, and agents end up knocking on doors in sanctuary cities where local officials won’t lift a finger to help them.
And who was whispering in Mullin’s ear? US Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) was among the politicians who pressed him to halt the stops, according to reports at the time.
Donald Trump Pulled the Plug Before Breakfast
Trump didn’t wait around for a training review.
Axios reported that a livid Trump complained to advisers about the pause late in the evening. By the next morning, he had reversed it with a post on Truth Social.
“We CANNOT give up one of ICE’s most important and effective Crime fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!” Trump wrote. He kept going: “The Radical Left Dumocrats would like to see this done, but it won’t happen on my watch.”
Read that second line twice. Trump looked at an order from his own Cabinet and recognized an item off the Democrat wish list.
Homan fell in line fast. “Vehicle stops are a main tool for us to do our job and we have to continue that,” the border czar told Fox News.
Mullin folded within hours. “We want our ICE officers to have all options available to keep them safe while executing our mission of deporting as many illegal alien criminals from our country as possible,” he posted on X.
Funny how that clarity only showed up after the boss slammed the brakes. A walk-back under pressure doesn’t erase the order that came first.
The DACA Trial Balloon Floated Right on Schedule
But the summer wasn’t the end of it.
After the midterms, Mullin told reporters at a counter-drone conference that “a lot of Democrats” had called him about working together on immigration. Then he floated something his own department had flatly ruled out.
“If we want to have an immigration reform to where we can look at DACA and figure out a way that these individuals can become maybe legal permanent citizens or something like this, that’ll be up to Congress,” Mullin said.
In nearly the same breath, he insisted, “We’re never going to allow amnesty to happen.”
Those two statements can’t share a roof. Permanent legal status for people who came here illegally is amnesty, no matter what name Washington slaps on the bill. And in March, DHS posted on X that DACA “does not confer any form of legal status in this country.”
Fox News Digital called the remarks Mullin’s first public suggestion that DACA recipients could get permanent status from Congress. Democrats, who take control of the House in January, heard every word.
The Midterm Math O’Reilly Skipped
O’Reilly pinned the Latino slide on immigration. CNN’s exit poll points somewhere else entirely.
Out of every issue CNN tracked, immigration stood alone as the one where voters who called it crucial sided with Republicans, and they did it by 15 points. Voters who put the Iran war at the top of their list, a fight the neoconservatives spent months selling, swung to Democrats by 46.
So the border was the one argument Republicans were actually winning. Maybe some Latino voters did sour on raids they watched on the evening news, and no exit poll can untangle every voter’s motive. But nobody can study those numbers and decide the fix is a softer man running DHS.
Trump seems to get that. He told Douthat, “I got an A-plus for closing up the border.” He allowed that the crackdown “might be too tough” in spots. And within hours of the interview, he handed the chief of staff job to Stephen Miller, the man who built the deportation agenda from the ground up.
A President planning to back off doesn’t promote Stephen Miller.
Democrats Want a Secretary Who Blinks
The socialist wing of the Democrat Party already showed its hand. Congresswoman Delia Ramirez (D-IL) filed a bill to dismantle DHS and scrap ICE altogether. “Today we are saying we want to abolish ICE,” she said at a press conference.
Every inch of daylight between the White House and DHS helps that crowd. A Secretary who yanks ICE off the road after one rough week and floats green cards for DACA recipients hands them their opening argument for free.
And amnesty has never been about compassion for Democrats. It’s about growing a new voter base and flooding the job market with cheap labor that undercuts American workers.
O’Reilly wants Mullin gone because he supposedly wasn’t gentle enough. The evidence says Mullin was the one who flinched.
Back in July, Trump told the agency exactly what he expects in one sentence: “ICE, be judicious, fair and smart, and go back and do your very important job.”
Sources: Mediaite, “‘What Are You Doing?!’ Bill O’Reilly Demands That Trump Banish Markwayne Mullin to the Bahamas in Scorched Earth Rant”; Alternet, “‘Arrogant as hell’: O’Reilly demands Trump dump Cabinet secretary”; CBS News, 60 Minutes transcript, Donald Trump post-midterm interview; Mediaite, “Trump Stuns 60 Minutes Correspondent by Admitting His Immigration Policy Has Been ‘Too Tough’”; NewsBusters, “Networks Use 60 Minutes Interview to Attack Trump, Tout Dem Investigations”; Fox News, “Trump reverses DHS policy, orders ICE to resume vehicle stops after one-day pause” (July 15, 2026); ABC News, “Trump overturns temporary pause on ICE traffic stops: Source”; Axios, “How a fuming Trump reversed ICE’s pause on vehicle stops”; The National News Desk via NBC Montana, “Trump overturns ICE traffic stop pause, day after DHS Sec reportedly ordered halt”; The Hill, “Trump, Mullin ‘on same page’ about resuming ICE traffic stops”; Conservative Institute, “Trump overrules his own DHS, orders ICE to resume traffic stops after two fatal shootings”; Fox News Digital, “Trump tells DHS chief to work with Democrats on immigration reform, but no amnesty”; The Daily Wire, “Mullin Reveals His Red Line For An Immigration Deal With Dems”; CNN 2026 exit poll.