Markwayne Mullin Will Punish Sanctuary Cities By Making Air Travel More Annoying For Everyone
That sure seems like a plan someone came up with while entirely sober.
Do you know why Markwayne Mullin’s name is Markwayne Mullin? It is because his parents couldn’t decide which of his uncles to name him after at the time of his birth, so they put both names on the birth certificate with the intent to pick one later … and then never got around to it.
Clearly, very normal decision-making and idea-having is something that runs in the family, as the DHS head and former Republican senator from Oklahoma held a meeting last week with airline and travel-industry executives about reducing or eliminating Customs and Border Protection staffing at airports in sanctuary cities, to punish them for being sanctuary cities.
This is not the first time he’s floated this idea on out there. He first publicly proposed it in April during an interview with Fox News, and despite having had several weeks to really think about it, is now doubling down.
“If they're a sanctuary city, should they really be processing customs into their city?” Mullin asked at the time. “If they're a sanctuary city and they're receiving international flights, and we're asking them to partner with us at the airport, but once they walk out of the airport, they're not going to enforce immigration policy — maybe we need to have a really hard look at that.”
Or, perhaps, an even harder look at “how airports work.”
So, just to be clear, that would mean that all international travelers — including Americans traveling abroad — would have to be rerouted to international airports and go through CBP in non-sanctuary cities like Atlanta and Dallas/Fort Worth. While the purpose of it would be to “punish” cities for not complying with ICE, it seems like it would actually be a far worse time for the non-sanctuary-city airports, which would have to pick up the slack, as well as for travelers, regardless of where they are going or coming from.
So like, in order to punish Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, Denver, Newark, Washington DC, etc., he’s going to make all of the international airports more chaotic. Airports can only take so many flights and so many passengers. If Atlanta, Miami, DFW etc. have to take on all of the international passenger and cargo flights, that means they’re not going to be able to allow other flights and probably charge a lot more for them.
As explained in The Atlantic:
Mullin’s proposal appears to reflect a thin grasp of global-travel logistics, as well as an inflated sense of the government’s ability to impose economic pain on specific cities, according to industry executives and former DHS officials I spoke with. The U.S. airports where international travelers and cargo first arrive are often not their final destination. A German business traveler flying into JFK may be en route to a meeting in Cincinnati. A Korean family landing at Los Angeles International Airport could be headed for Disney World. The proportion of economic pain imposed on sanctuary cities might be relatively small compared with the wider ripple effects on the U.S. travel industry.
Also … travelers only go through customs when they first land. So, conceivably, we could have a whole lot of people flying into Atlanta, going through customs there and then subsequently taking another flight into JFK or LAX if that’s where they have to go. Americans flying out of these hubs will also have to travel to another destination first in order to fly out of the country. There is absolutely no entity that this is going to work out for, other than Markwayne Mullin and whoever was sitting on the barstool next to him while he came up with this brilliant idea.
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Flights are already getting expensive, thanks to the rapidly rising cost of gas and the demise of Spirit Airlines, and many have recently announced austerity cuts and plans to deprive travelers of their sacred complimentary Biscoff cookies and ginger ale, so it’s hard to see why Mullin thinks this is a thing that would go over well with anyone, regardless of their political affiliation. Pretty much no one gets to the airport and says to themselves “Boy, I sure do wish these lines were longer and also that I had to take multiple connecting flights to get to where I’m going!!”
On the other hand, it’s good that people know that this is the kind of high-level thinking that goes on in the Trump administration, and also what you get when the person you put in charge of the DHS has a background in mixed martial arts and plumbing. The former, especially, given that there is a much higher rate of CTE in MMA than there is in plumbing, and a serious brain injury is just about the only valid excuse one might have for thinking this might be a good idea.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
Do you know why Markwayne Mullin’s name is Markwayne Mullin?
I assumed it’s because they took one look at him and decided “yeah, probably going to be a serial killer” and decided to lean into that with the name.
OMG! Tulsi out!