Markwayne Mullin

From plumber to senator

Markwayne Mullin, the youngest of seven children, is the son of a plumbing contractor and grew up in Westville, Oklahoma, near the state’s eastern border with Arkansas (Reuters). He attended Missouri Valley College on a wrestling scholarship but left at 20 when his father fell ill, postponing his studies to save the family plumbing business with his wife, Christie (Reuters). Over the following decades, Mullin Plumbing grew into the largest service company in the region, and the Mullins founded other ventures including Mullin Environmental and Rowan’s Steakhouse in neighboring Stilwell, named for Christie’s family (U.S. Senate). Along the way he fought professionally in mixed martial arts, retiring undefeated at 5-0 before his 2016 induction into the Oklahoma Wrestling Hall of Fame, and he hosted a home-repair talk show in Oklahoma (Reuters).

Mullin won Oklahoma’s 2nd congressional district in November 2012 and took his House seat in January 2013, representing the district for a decade (Reuters). When Senator Jim Inhofe announced in early 2022 that he would resign, Mullin ran in the special election, defeated his Democratic rival that November, and was sworn into the Senate on January 3, 2023 (Reuters). An enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation, he became the first Tribal citizen to serve in the Senate in nearly two decades and only the second Cherokee Nation citizen ever to sit in the chamber (U.S. Senate). He served on the Armed Services, Appropriations, Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, and Indian Affairs committees (U.S. Senate).

The pugnacious style that defined his public image arrived early in his Senate term. In 2023, during a Senate health-committee hearing, Mullin rose from his chair to challenge Teamsters president Sean O’Brien — paraphrasing O’Brien’s own X post calling Mullin a “clown” and a “fraud” — to “stand your butt up,” even removing his wedding ring before committee chair Bernie Sanders ordered him to sit down (Reuters).

From Noem’s replacement to Homeland Security

On March 5, 2026, President Donald Trump announced that Mullin would become Secretary of Homeland Security, effective March 31, 2026, replacing Kristi Noem, who was moved to a new role as “Special Envoy for The Shield of the Americas” (Xinhua). Noem had been under bipartisan pressure after the January 2026 Minneapolis deaths of two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, whom she had labeled “domestic terrorists,” and after criticism of a $220 million DHS advertising campaign that featured herself (bdnews24). The nomination moved fast: Mullin’s hearing before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs took place on March 18, 2026, and the Senate confirmed him 54-45 on the night of March 23, 2026 (WUTV29). He was sworn in at the White House on March 24, 2026 (Berry Appleman & Leiden). “My goal in six months is that we’re not in the lead story every single day,” he said during his confirmation hearing, which barely touched on election issues (Votebeat).

The election pivot

That pledge did not survive the summer. In July, Trump delivered a primetime address attacking the integrity of the nation’s voting system, and the next day Mullin emerged as the public face of the administration’s election overhaul at a White House press conference: he claimed his agency had found more than 250,000 noncitizen voters on the rolls in four states, challenged the integrity of voting machines, and threatened to jail election officials who did not do enough to prevent voter fraud (Votebeat). States pushed back on the numbers, and DHS quietly walked them back — in Nevada, the agency scaled its estimate from 16,000 down to 185 (Votebeat).

From there Mullin pressed further, declaring that “election security is national security.” News reporting showed he had directed hundreds of agents to focus on hunting noncitizens on voting rolls across the country — “even though there is no evidence of a widespread problem with noncitizens voting in U.S. elections,” Votebeat reported — and he told reporters he might send ICE agents into polling places on Election Day if they received reports of undocumented immigrants they were trying to arrest, a suggestion critics called voter intimidation (Votebeat). A DHS spokesperson said ICE was not planning operations targeting polling locations, and the administration’s broader anti-noncitizen-voting campaign had produced at least six arrests of noncitizens accused of voting (Votebeat).

The ruling that stopped the grant conditions

The election push collided with the courts on September 28, 2026. Earlier that year, DHS had announced it would withhold 20 percent of funding under grant programs for preparing for terrorist attacks and other threats — totaling about $1.1 billion — until state or local governments adopted election-administration measures favored by the administration (Reuters). In announcing the plan to condition the funds, Mullin said the new requirements would protect election systems from foreign interference and cyberattacks (Reuters). The conditions would have required grant recipients to use equipment accepting hand-marked paper ballots rather than electronic systems, manually audit at least 5 percent of ballots cast, and compare their voter rolls against a DHS database to identify noncitizens registered to vote (Reuters).

In a 24-page opinion, Washington-based U.S. District Judge Amir Ali — the subject of this site’s Amir Ali profile — sided with the counties and cities in Texas, Ohio, and Tennessee that sued, holding that the conditioning exceeded the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s authority: “Congress did not authorize the grant program to be used for the sort of election administration reforms FEMA demands here — changes that, whether sound or not as a matter of policy, are not advanced to prepare for or respond to ‘acts of terrorism’” (Reuters). A separate challenge by mostly Democratic-led states remained pending at the time of the ruling (Reuters).

What this profile does not claim

It does not give Mullin’s exact birth date — only content-farm biographies publish one, and no tier1 or tier2 source read for this profile states it. It does not claim Mullin is the first Cherokee Nation citizen to hold a U.S. Cabinet post; the Senate biography and Reuters support his Senate record, but no tier1 or tier2 source read here states the Cabinet claim. It does not assign Mullin a drafting role in the FEMA grant conditions beyond announcing and defending them. It takes no position on the merits of his noncitizen-voter claims beyond reporting what Votebeat and Reuters verified: states disputed the figures, DHS scaled them back, and no evidence of a widespread noncitizen-voting problem was found. One tier3 outlet printed the confirmation vote as 54-35; this profile uses 54-45, corroborated by two independent tier2 sources. It makes no claim about DHS operations after September 2026 beyond the sources read here.