Markwayne Mullin sat before the Senate Homeland Security Committee yesterday and said things that sounded like retreat. He regretted calling Alex Pretti — killed by federal agents in Minneapolis — a “deranged individual.” He committed to requiring judicial warrants before entering homes and businesses. He promised to lower the temperature, stop the partisan bickering, respect the elected officials of states that hadn’t wanted federal agents in their streets in the first place...
And a certain kind of hope moved through the resistance community. The pressure worked. The bully backed down. The people won.
Hold that feeling. And then look more carefully at what actually happened.
Mullin needed Democratic votes to be confirmed. Rand Paul — his own committee chairman, a fellow Republican — voted against him and called him unfit for the job. Without at least one Democrat crossing the aisle, Mullin goes nowhere. Every concession he offered at that hearing was calculated against that specific arithmetic, in that specific room, on that specific day. Confirmation hearing promises are among the most reliably perishable commodities in American political life...
Tom Homan — the actual architect of ICE’s operational culture, the man who ran enforcement day to day while Noem ran the meme account — endorsed Mullin enthusiastically and sees his confirmation as a “reset.” That word is doing a lot of work. A reset between DHS leadership and Homan, who rarely spoke to Noem, means the enforcement machinery that killed Pretti and Renee Good gets a more functional chain of command, not a more restrained one.
Noem’s incompetence was, in a terrible irony, an accidental protection for the very communities she was targeting. Her theatrical brutality was so visible, so poorly managed, so nakedly cruel that it activated precisely the resistance that constrained her — the human chains, the Denver executive order, the congressional investigations. She made the human cost impossible to ignore and in doing so handed the resistance its recruiting posters. A more competent Secretary pursuing the same agenda more quietly, building functional relationships with local law enforcement, reducing the dramatic confrontations while maintaining or even increasing enforcement operations — that Secretary removes the visibility that armed the resistance, and in doing so may inflict far more damage on far more people with far less outcry to stop it.
Mullin is being sent in specifically to be that Secretary. The question is not whether ICE stops being the lead story. It is whether the people being targeted are actually safer. Those are not the same question.
So what does the resistance need to do now, in this specific moment, before the spotlight moves and the commitments evaporate?
First — document everything, precisely, before confirmation.
Mullin’s warrantless entry commitment is on the congressional record. Every specific promise made at that hearing needs to be catalogued, timestamped, and placed in the hands of the organizations already doing ground-level resistance work in Minneapolis, Chicago, Denver and Los Angeles. Not in think-tank white papers. In forms ordinary people can reference and act on. The baseline has to be established now, before the transcript fades, because the moment he is confirmed the clock starts on accountability and there will be no going back to establish what was actually promised.
Second — the infrastructure that produced the pressure must stay intact.
The human chains, the community warning networks, the rapid-response teams, the legal observer networks — these are what actually moved the needle. The temptation after a perceived victory is to demobilize, to feel the pressure worked and can now ease. That is precisely when the rollback happens. The resistance infrastructure needs to be maintained and if anything deepened, so that when the first warrantless entry occurs under Mullin — and it will — the response is immediate and documented rather than having to be rebuilt from scratch.
Third — the deaths of Pretti and Good, and all the others whose names haven’t yet broken through to national attention, cannot become footnotes.
These are the fulcrum of everything. And they are not alone — they are the documented surface of an enforcement campaign that has been killing, disappearing, and destroying families across this country with a systematicity that the national media has largely declined to map. Mullin’s regret was conditional — pending investigation, he said, and if proven wrong he would absolutely apologize. That investigation needs to be demanded, tracked, and publicized relentlessly. If it produces no accountability — if the agents who killed these people face no consequences — that is the answer to every promise Mullin made in that hearing room. The families of Pretti and Good and every other person killed or disappeared under this enforcement regime deserve visible, sustained solidarity not just from activists but from elected officials at every level, indefinitely. The moment those deaths are absorbed into the news cycle and forgotten is the moment the implicit permission for the next killing is quietly granted.
Fourth — blue-state legal infrastructure needs to be weaponized proactively.
Denver’s executive order showed what’s possible at the municipal level. The attorneys general of Colorado, Minnesota, Illinois, California need to build the legal architecture now — before violations occur — so that the first breach of the warrantless entry commitment triggers immediate injunctive action rather than months of litigation while enforcement continues. The legal and the political need to be synchronized and ready, not assembled in reaction after the damage is done.
Fifth — Congressional Democrats need to make accountability structural rather than rhetorical.
The senators who extracted these commitments need to schedule oversight hearings specifically on DHS enforcement practices within ninety days of confirmation. Not broad theater. Narrow, specific questions with documented answers: Have judicial warrants been required? What is the compliance rate? What happened in these specific incidents since confirmation? Targeted oversight is the difference between accountability and a press release.
Sixth — the media reality has to be faced directly.
Mainstream media will not credit the resistance as the protagonist of this story. It will cover the next dramatic incident — and then frame it, contextualize it, and ultimately absorb it into a narrative that serves the people who own it. And we should be clear about who those people are: billionaires, corporations, and increasingly hard-right personalities whose financial and ideological interests are directly served by an immigration enforcement apparatus that suppresses labor organizing, drives down wages, and keeps vulnerable communities too frightened to assert their rights. The consolidation is not incidental — it is the point. The media that covers these stories is owned by the same class of people whose economic interests are protected by the policies being enforced. That is not conspiracy. That is the ownership structure, publicly documented, operating exactly as ownership structures do.
Which is why the independent journalists, the community media organizations, the Substack writers, the Democracy Now correspondents, the contributors to The Intercept and Truthout and In These Times who actually documented Minneapolis and Denver and Chicago are not just doing better journalism — they are doing the only journalism on this subject that is structurally capable of telling the truth. They need to be supported, resourced, and treated as essential rather than supplementary, because the story of whether Mullin keeps his promises will not be broken by the Washington Post. It will be broken by someone embedded in the communities where the next raid happens, answerable to those communities rather than to shareholders.
The resistance did win something real. The pressure forced a posture change from an administration that does not change posture. The human chains, the Denver police order, the congressional investigations, the deaths that could not be spun away — these extracted concrete on-the-record commitments that did not exist before. That matters and deserves acknowledgment.
But the people are the protagonist only as long as the people keep showing up. Protagonists in the stories that actually change things don’t get to rest between acts...
The story didn’t end at yesterday’s hearing. It just moved into a different and in some ways harder phase — where the enemy is not theatrical brutality but quiet competence in the service of the same agenda, and where the resistance has to be sophisticated enough to tell the difference between a genuine retreat and a strategic repositioning dressed up as one.
The work just changed shape. It didn’t end.
~ John Fridinger
Spring, 2026
Talent, OR