Markwayne Mullin strikes softer tone but defends Trump policies in Senate hearing

Trump pick to replace Kristi Noem signaled he’d avoid her mistakes but defends president’s immigration campaign Markwayne Mullin defended his ability to lead the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and expressed regrets for comments he made about a US citizen killed by immigration agents at his confirmation hearing on Wednesday, which began on an unusually quarrelsome note when a fellow Republican senator accused him of encouraging violence. Donald Trump earlier this month nominated Mullin, a first-term Republican senator from Oklahoma, to lead DHS, after the president ousted Kristi Noem amid public blowback against the administration’s aggressive approach to its mass deportation agenda and the deaths of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Appearing before the Senate committee on homeland security and governmental affairs, Mullin struck a conciliatory tone and signaled he would seek to avoid some of the mistakes made by Noem, whose publicity-heavy approach to leading the agency reportedly led to the president souring on her leadership. But he simultaneously cast himself as a defender of the president and his campaign to remove all undocumented immigrants from the co