Mullin Secretly Abetted Hundreds of Deportations and Arrests

DHS nominee gave Trump info that led to specious arrests and claims of extraordinary presidential powers

Mar 11, 2026

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Donald Trump and Sen. Markwayne Mullin at an Oct. 31, 2024, campaign rally in Albuquerque, NM. (Screengrab / Roll Call video.)

A trove of information used last year to arrest and deport hundreds of people was provided to the Trump administration by Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK), according to one of the people who gathered it.

The information, some of which has been refuted, aligns with claims Pres. Donald Trump made to justify seeking extraordinary powers to remove people from the county without due process and destroy alleged drug boats without warning.

Mullin is expected to get a hearing next week from the Senate Homeland Security Committee for his nomination to serve as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees federal immigration enforcement.

As I reported on Sunday, it was Mullin who connected the 2024 Trump campaign team with two men who claim Venezuela stole the 2020 election. But the documents and briefings they gave Trump’s team weren’t just about elections.

They also gave the Trump team information on hundreds of alleged gang members.

Their information provided the basis for an unknown numbers of arrests and deportations and provided the White House with predicates for claiming extraordinary presidential powers. (Neither Mullin nor the White House have responded to my requests for comment.)

One year ago, the Miami Herald revealed that a former CIA official, Gary Berntsen, and unnamed partners, had been briefing the Trump team since before the January 2025 inauguration.

Berntsen’s main partner was revealed later in 2025 to be Martin Rodil, a Venezuelan expatriate who’s worked with U.S. conservatives, including the office of then-Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), for years. The Herald reported that Berntsen and Rodil gave the Trump transition team documents containing the identities of 1,800 Venezuelan gang members.

By the end of March 2025, the Herald reported, that information had led to the arrests or deportations of at least 800 Venezuelans from the U.S., including what the Herald called a “significant” number of those sent without due process to El Salvador’s notorious new prison accused of systemic human-rights abuses.

Some of the men were allegedly tortured, according to human-rights groups and reporting by 60 Minutes. Subsequent investigations determined that only a small fraction had records as violent criminals.

Berntsen in two right-wing media appearances last year said it was Mullin who connected him and Rodil to the Trump campaign and relayed their information. As I noted on Sunday, Lindell TV’s Emerald Robinson claims that Mullin got Rodil in front of Susie Wiles, now the White House chief of staff.

Wiles then connected Rodil to Elon Musk, who verified Rodil’s claims, according to Robinson. Trump last summer wanted to hear Rodil’s and Berntsen’s claims for himself, Robinson says.

The election-conspiracy theories and the allegations about Tren de Aragua are just part of one alleged, sprawling conspiracy, in which Venezuela — working with Cuba, China, Russia, Iran, and Serbia — has rigged or at least tried to rig elections in 72 countries.

Berntsen and Rodil also allege that former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro deployed Tren de Aragua as a paramilitary army to destabilize the United States.

That narrative, which emerged in the Herald story and has been publicly discussed since then by Berntsen and Rodil, lines up with claims about Tren de Aragua that the U.S. government only began making the day Trump took office.

Just hours after taking the oath of office on Jan. 20, 2025, the new Trump administration somehow already had accumulated enough intelligence to reach a determination about Tren de Aragua and other gangs dramatically different from the intelligence community’s own assessment.

Trump’s executive order on Inauguration Day said “International cartels constitute a national-security threat beyond that posed by traditional organized crime.” Tren de Aragua and MS-13 were alleged to “threaten the stability of the international order in the Western Hemisphere.”

On March 15, 2025, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, enabling immigration officials to deny suspects due process, effectively labeling them soldiers, an invading army. Tren de Aragua members, Trump’s executive order claimed,

“are conducting irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions against the United States … to further its [the cartel’s] objectives of harming United States citizens, undermining public safety, and supporting the Maduro regime’s goal of destabilizing democratic nations in the Americas, including the United States.”

It was titled, “Invocation of the Alien Enemies Act Regarding the Invasion of The United States by Tren De Aragua.”

Trump’s own intelligence community refuted those claims, determining there was insufficient evidence to support them, the New York Times revealed. (The Times story prompted Berntsen to go public with the Herald.)

But Trump had been speaking in similar terms since before taking office.

He had made immigration a signature issue years ago, leveraging xenophobia and false claims about immigrant crime. But at some point in the final months of his 2024 campaign, his language changed.

It’s not clear exactly when Mullin connected Rodil to Wiles, who was then Trump’s campaign manager. But hysteria around Tren de Aragua had been whipped up in the summer of 2024 with help from frightening video out of Aurora, CO.

Alarming claims of Tren de Aragua taking over apartment complexes reportedly arose in part from management spin regarding problems predating the arrival of gang members. But that didn’t matter any more than the truth about Haitians in Springfield, OH.

Trump began citing Aurora in August 2024. According to Robinson, Mullin and former Sen. David Perdue (R-GA) “finally arranged a meeting” between Wiles and Rodil “A few weeks before the 2024 election.”

Throughout September 2024, Trump kept the focus on immigration. He invoked Aurora during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris. On Sept. 13, 2024, he announced he’d do the biggest mass deportations ever.

But it wasn’t until Oct. 11, less than a month before the 2024 election, according to a search of transcripts, that Trump applied the term “army” in conjunction with Tren de Aragua.

Trump didn’t go as far as Berntsen and Rodil. And he tossed in Congo for good measure. But Venezuela was the focus.

And the Berntsen/Rodil narrative could be seen in risible claims suggesting a national campaign by the criminal gang. “in Aurora, Colorado, and communities in all 50 states,” Trump claimed on Oct. 11, 2024, “this Venezuelan gang is terrorizing law-abiding citizens.”

In Aurora that night, Trump said that “Kamala has imported an army of illegal alien gang members and migrant criminals from the dungeons of the third world.”

That was a central element of Berntsen’s and Rodil’s narrative; that Maduro dispatched Tren de Aragua members from Venezuela’s prisons to storm the U.S.

Trump deployed variations on this rhetoric for the rest of October, in the final few weeks of the campaign, the same period in which Robinson says Mullin connected the campaign to Rodil.

“An army of illegal alien gang members.” - Oct. 11, 2024
“She's resettled them into your communities to prey upon innocent Americans.” - Oct. 18, 2024
“She has unleashed an army of migrant gangs who are waging a campaign of violence and terror against our citizens all over our country … an invasion of criminal migrants from prisons and jails, insane asylums, and mental institutions from all around the world, from Venezuela to the Congo” - Oct. 28, 2024

It’s worth noting that Berntsen claims the Biden administration was in on it. High-ranking CIA and FBI officials were paid off, traitors. So were members of Congress, in Berntsen’s telling. Except Mullin.

In the campaign’s final days, Mullin joined Trump for at least four rallies.

By this point, Mullin had connected Trump’s team with Berntsen’s, according to Robinson and Berntsen himself. He says federal law enforcement and members of Congress were either afraid or too corrupt to listen. Fox News and Newsmax were in on it, too.

Only Mullin listened. Only Mullin helped.

On Sept. 3, 2025, Berntsen told Adam Carolla that Mullin had taken them to the Trump campaign, and that Mullin himself had taken their information to Trump:

“The one politician in America [who] was a hero: Markwayne Mullins [sic] of Oklahoma. Of course: The guy’s a UFC [sic¹] fighter. That guy took us to the campaign. He took the information to the president. Markwayne Mullins is a stud. That guy’s a, he’s a hero, and he was the one politician in America not afraid to tell the truth.”

In December 2025, appearing on Lara Logan’s online show, Berntsen repeated his praise for Mullin. He put it in the context of their efforts, bankrolled by fellow election-denier Patrick Byrne, to find computer engineers to serve as witnesses.

Berntsen: “When we went to the Congress, they were afraid—”
Logan: “Should’ve come to me, Gary.”
Berntsen: “—they wouldn’t have helped, they wouldn’t help us. One politician in America was not afraid. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma.”
Logan: “Yes.”
Berntsen: “He’s a real man, that guy.”
Logan: “He’s a real man.”
Berntsen: “He is a hell of a guy.”
Logan: “Also went and rescued people in Afghanistan.”
Berntsen: “He’s a helluva guy. And when he, when he saw — but it took us years to get to him. And all this time, y’know, we’re, y’know, Patrick Byrne and all these engineers are engineering and re-engineering and moving country and doing all of this stuff.”
Logan: “Well, Patrick is kind of a savant.”
Berntsen: “And [retired Lt. Gen.] Mike Flynn, though, is a real hero, because Flynn believed in us.”

All told, 252 Venezuelans were sent, without due process, to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison in March and April last year.

The Miami Herald reported that Berntsen and his team “were not able to confirm if all 238 Venezuelans [up to that point] sent to El Salvador were in fact criminals, but said that a significant number of them are.”

The Herald’s reporting suggests that Berntsen and Rodil provided information about that significant number. If true, it means Mullin has already played a key role in a scandalous, legally overruled mass deportation.

And the Herald reported that Berntsen was, in fact, briefing adminitration officials. Other news outlets have reported that Berntsen’s team continues to have access to elements of the Justice Department.

Berntsen and his team also made claims about the criminal records of the people taken to CECOT.

“Most of those that were sent to El Salvador had criminal records, not necessarily from crimes committed in the United States but from the others countries from which they came,” an unnamed source on Berntsen’s and Rodil’s team told The Herald.

That’s been borne out by subsequent investigations involving Latin American police records. But those investigations offer more context.

Human Rights Watch found that 48.8% of the deported had no criminal histories. Only a handful are believed to have committed violent crimes.

A joint investigative project including ProPublica and the Texas Tribune concluded that, of the initial 238 Venezuelans, “only 32 of the deportees had been convicted of U.S. crimes and … most were nonviolent offenses, such as retail theft or traffic violations.”

The DHS, under Secretary Kristi Noem, refused to release whatever intelligence it used to target the Venezuelans. “We are confident in our law enforcement’s intelligence, and we aren’t going to share intelligence reports and undermine national security every time a gang member denies he is one,” the DHS told 60 Minutes.

The dog that hasn’t barked, though, is the lack of subsequent evidence supporting the claim by Berntsen and Rodil, and the insinuation by Trump, that Maduro deployed Tren de Aragua as a paramilitary force to destabilize the U.S.

That narrative provided the basis for the Alien Enemies Act invocation and underpinned the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel memo justifying maritime strikes that have so far killed 157 people without warnings or due process.

But a panel of judges decided the claim was unfounded.

The administration’s potential witnesses, starting with the captured gang members in Aurora, haven’t flipped on Maduro.

They weren’t even charged with gang activity, let alone as foreign soldiers. Most of them faced gun and drug charges, standard beefs for a street gang.

The 252 exiled to El Salvador weren’t even interviewed or interrogated for their supposed evidence about the organization they ostensibly served. Ultimately, they were sent home as part of a prisoner swap.

In fact, of the thousands of people taken from America streets, dumped in makeshift camps, or dropped in strange new countries, to date the administration has presented publicly not a single witness to support the accusation that a paramilitary army came here on Maduro’s orders.

None has been charged, let alone convicted, of crimes reflecting the claims Mullin couriered and that provided the basis for Trump’s assertion of extraordinary powers.

Mullin has not commented publicly about aiding Berntsen and Rodil. It’s unclear whether he’ll be asked about any of it at his confirmation hearing.

Neither Homeland Security Committee Chair Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) nor any of the Democratic members responded to requests for comment.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) sits on the Foreign Affairs Committee and gets briefings from the administration, but not about this. Last November, his office told me Democrats hadn’t been told anything about getting outside intel.

Murphy Communications Director Deni Kamper said, “[W]e haven’t heard anything about an outside group feeding the administration information or driving Trump’s policy related to Venezuela.”