← Videos · Border & Immigration

Mullin Holds a Kansas City Press Conference on Fully Funding CBP and ICE for Three Years, May 9, 2026

May 9, 2026 · U.S. Department of Homeland Security · 0:26:56

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin held a press conference at Kansas City airport, in the Department of Homeland Security’s upload of the event, to press the case for fully funding U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for the next three years, alongside Congressman Mark Alford and CBP officers, as the department described the event; the department’s public notice and C-SPAN’s listing date the press conference to May 9, 2026.

Mullin said, as he stated it, that getting the department funded had been his number-one focus since becoming Secretary, taking 70–80% of his time, and described five weeks of negotiation that he said moved from three Democratic issues to nine and then two more, ending — as he recounted a private answer — with the other side unwilling to reach yes until after the primaries. He described the call with the President, Leader Thune, and Speaker Johnson, as he recounted it, in which the decision was made to fund ICE and CBP for three years through budget reconciliation — in his words, not the way to fund government, but the only option left — so the agencies could not be shut down again; Mullin noted, as he stated it, that the department had been shut down four times in a year, including a 76-day shutdown during which, he said, CBP officers still showed up every day. Alford, who said he sits on the Appropriations Committee, made the same case, as he stated it: Congress must act urgently through reconciliation to deliver multi-year funding and certainty for ICE and CBP, because, as he put it, failure is not an option. Mullin also pointed, as he stated it, to Kansas City’s six FIFA World Cup games — six Super Bowls in 38 days, in his framing, among 78 games across 11 host cities — as part of the mission the funding fight put at risk.

Why it matters

Kansas City is where the administration’s DHS funding strategy was stated plainly by the Secretary himself: split ICE and CBP out of the annual appropriations fight and fund them for three years through reconciliation, a play call Mullin attributed to a joint decision with the President and congressional leadership — the funding theory his whole first year at the department runs on.

Scoreboard watch

Scoreboard watch: the three-year reconciliation funding plan for ICE and CBP that Secretary Mullin announced the decision for at Kansas City on May 9, 2026, as he stated it — flagged for the scoreboard editor to check against the reconciliation bill’s progress; no entry is published from this page.

Sources: U.S. Department of Homeland Security, “Secretary Mullin Holds Press Conference on the Need to Fully Fund CBP & ICE for Next Three Years” (official upload, May 10, 2026, embedded above; event of May 9, 2026 per the department’s public notice and C-SPAN’s May 9, 2026 listing of the news conference; remarks as delivered by Secretary Mullin and Congressman Alford).