Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin struggled to answer if the Trump administration considers Haiti a “safe” place to deport temporary visa holders.
Mullin, 48, appeared on State of the Union on Sunday, and was asked by host Jake Tapper about plans to cut off temporary legal protections and deport roughly 350,000 Haitians and Syrians.
“Is it the position of the Trump administration that Haiti is a safe country to send these people to?” Tapper asked.
The former Oklahoma senator mused: “Well, we take a lot of things into consideration. Secretary Rubio, the president, and I have had multiple conversations about this. Obviously, there’s not—there’s the—the qualification isn’t quite just that simple.”
Mullin reminded viewers that many Haitians have lived and worked in the U.S. for “20 years, 30 years,” arguing that they‘ve “had plenty of time to reestablish their status inside the United States, they just chose not to.”
He then blamed Biden’s “open border” for Haitians arriving to take “advantage of a weak leadership.”
“There isn’t a more generous country in the world than the United States,” he claimed, “but we don’t want people to take advantage of it.”
Tapper asked again: “Do you maintain that it is safe in Haiti to send these people back?”
Mullin responded with an acknowledgement that it is very much his job to decide that status, or at least know the current answer—but that he didn’t really want to do so right now.
“This is a decision that’s being made from the State Department, from myself, and the president,” he said.
“And there’s a lot of things that we look at...uh...as when we take this into consideration... it’s not just one factor that plays into this,” he said.
Tapper pitched a third attempt at his question by stating that Haiti has a level four “do not travel” advisory as of this April—to which Mullin argued that the concerning guideline doesn’t apply to Haitians or within Haiti itself; only to Americans who might be considering a Haitian vacation.
The CNN host countered with evidence of increasing levels of rife gang violence, kidnappings for ransom, robberies, and sexual assault, summarizing: “That doesn’t sound safe to me.”
Tapper went on to cite statistics from global bodies warning of the high violence and murder rates for Haitians, noting, “Those aren’t Americans.”
Mullin paused for an awkwardly long moment, before retorting: “Is there a question in that?”
