Homeland Security chief Markwayne Mullin says calls to abolish DHS are a left-wing push for socialism through chaos and demographic change, and he is drawing a hard line.
Speaking in Washington, D.C., at Breitbart News’s Border Security, Public Safety, and American Sovereignty Event, Mullin tied demands to scrap the Department of Homeland Security to a broader political project. He argued that activists who want DHS gone are not merely arguing about budgets or bureaucracy. In his view, they are trying to break the country’s ability to keep order so they can remake it.
That charge lands as Democrats and allied groups keep pressing to gut immigration enforcement. Mullin’s message was blunt: protect the homeland, enforce the law, and stop treating border security as a scandal.
Mullin laid out what he called his theory of how a free republic gets turned into something else.
He told the audience that socialism and communism do not win on open debate in a stable country. They advance when daily life becomes unmanageable and voters start searching for whoever promises to end the disorder.
"My theory behind that is the only way you can take a republic, a true democracy, a true republic like the United States, or any country, and turn it into a socialist, communist country, is you got to fabricate chaos,"
He pressed the same point in plainer terms. If the chaos is not already there, he said, someone has to create it. Once fear and disorder peak, the opening appears for a system most Americans would reject in calmer times.
"[If you are a socialist], you’ve got to create the chaos. If there’s not chaos, you got to create the chaos. And once it gets so chaotic and people are looking for someone [to end the chaos], then you can usher in socialism and communism. You see that every single time when you have a democracy that fails, they push socialism and communism."
Mullin added that the experiment is “guaranteed to fail,” and that voters eventually try to claw their way back to democratic self-government, often after a gap of about 20 to 25 years. The cost, in his telling, is paid first by the public that has to live through the breakdown.
From that frame, Mullin asked a basic question: why is the agency charged with protecting the country treated as the villain?
"We have the job of protecting the homeland. It should never be controversial. Why is the Department of Homeland Security controversial? Why is it controversial to protect our backyards?"
He linked the “Defund police” push to the campaign against DHS itself. In his account, lawless pressure and attacks on enforcement are not separate fights. They are tools in the same project, weaken the people who keep order, then exploit the result.
"Who would ever think “Defund Police!” would become [the cause of] abolishing Department of Homeland Security when our job is to protect the homeland?"
That is the accountability point Mullin kept returning to. An agency whose job is homeland defense should not need a public-relations apology for doing that job. When abolishing it becomes a progressive cause, he argued, the motive is not reform. It is removal of the obstacle.
Mullin also went straight at population change as a political strategy. He said that if someone asked artificial intelligence how to turn a red state blue, or how to move a country from democracy toward socialism, the answer would be the same every time.
"If you were to AI the question to [ask] “How do you turn a red state blue, or how do you turn a country from democracy to socialism?”, it’ll tell you 100 percent of the time you got to change demographics."
He tied that claim to “lawless activity” and to the same anti-police politics he said now reaches DHS. Change who lives under the law, weaken the law’s enforcers, and the electoral map follows. That is the sequence he described, not as a metaphor, but as the method.
Breitbart’s account of the event also pointed to former President Barack Obama’s long-running emphasis on migration as a way to reshape the United States into a more progressive, multicultural political order. Mullin’s warning sat against that backdrop: demographic change is not only cultural. It is power.
Mullin was not arguing into a vacuum. In late September, Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-IL) used a press conference to call for stripping power from the agencies that actually enforce immigration law.
Ramirez, speaking in Spanish and joined by pro-migrant allies, put the goal in the open.
"We are going to... completely defund and strip authority from ICE and CBP [which] keep lists of you,"
ICE and Customs and Border Protection are the frontline forces for removals, border control, and interior enforcement. “Strip authority” is not a technical tweak. It is a plan to leave the federal government less able to know who is here illegally and less able to do anything about it.
Mullin’s answer to that politics was the opposite of open-borders sentiment. He drew a bright line between legal immigration and lawbreaking.
"We’re not anti-immigration... If you want to embrace what America is all about, we want you, but you’re going to follow our nation’s laws,"
That is the traditional bargain most voters still recognize. Welcome people who come the right way. Do not reward the people who treat the border as optional. And do not pretend that dismantling ICE and CBP is compassion when the practical result is less enforcement and more chaos in American communities.
Mullin’s speech stitched the pieces together. Fabricate disorder. Attack the police model. Target DHS, ICE, and CBP. Drive demographic change faster than assimilation and lawful process can handle. Then sell concentrated political control as the cure for the mess.
He cast DHS’s role in the simplest terms available: protect the homeland. In a country facing mass illegal immigration and repeated fights over whether enforcement is even legitimate, that mission is either serious or it is not. Mullin’s position is that it is serious, and that treating it as controversial tells you more about the critics than about the department.
Republics do not lose self-government only through dramatic coups. They can lose it when leaders refuse to keep basic order and when activists punish the agencies that still try. Mullin’s warning was that the left’s war on homeland security is not a budgeting dispute. It is a bet that chaos, plus demographic leverage, can finish what elections alone have not.
Americans who want a country of laws do not owe anyone a fair hearing on abolishing the department that guards the homeland, and they should not pretend the motive is mystery when the method is already on the record.
