In an interview on CNN's State of the Union on June 14, 2026, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said he was ready to “throw out the Constitution” to ensure “only citizens of the United States are voting.” When the interviewer reacted, he immediately backpedaled: “I mean, not throw it out. Throw it out as an argument.”
Mullin used the interview to lay out the department's election plans ahead of the 2026 midterms. He said DHS is scrubbing state voter rolls, claiming, “we see thousands of individuals that are registered to vote and that has had mail-out ballots to them,” though he did not identify which states or rolls. He defended Trump's push for federal citizenship checks and the SAVE Act, and would not rule out a role for ICE at polling places. Asked by Kasie Hunt, “Are you willing to rule out sending ICE agents?”, he answered, “No, what I said is that we would only be there if a threat” arose, The Hill reported. Pressed, “So, you're not ruling it out?”, he said, “No, keep in mind, why would ICE be there? Because only people that should be voting there is American citizens. There shouldn't be any immigration enforcement.”
Every major study has found noncitizen voting to be vanishingly rare. Election administration is a power the Constitution assigns to the states, and voting-rights groups warned that DHS reviewing voter rolls and floating ICE at polling sites is an unprecedented federal intrusion into the midterms (see Under Trump's Order, the Postal Service Would Refuse to Deliver Mail Ballots for States That Don't Hand Over Their Voter Lists).
Correction (October 5, 2026): This entry previously quoted Mullin as saying officers “would only be there if a threat is arised” and named Dana Bash as the interviewer. Neither The Hill nor Fox News, which both name Kasie Hunt, carries that wording; the quotation now follows The Hill's account of the exchange. Salon's report names Bash, so the entry no longer names the host for the Constitution remark. The Hill's headline was also mislabeled and has been corrected.