Mullin’s tenure has been defined by denying things that turned out to be true. When over 300 detainees at Newark’s Delaney Hall launched a hunger strike over rotten food and medical neglect, Mullin publicly insisted there was “NO hunger strike” — right up until a congressman with a court order got inside and confirmed the opposite, and confirmed detainees were being retaliated against for participating. Under his department, ICE has eliminated its own rule requiring it to report detainee deaths within 30 days of release — the exact rule created in 2021 to stop agencies from quietly releasing critically ill detainees just before death — while the actual detainee mortality rate has climbed elevenfold since 2022. This is a department whose leader’s default response to documented abuse is to call it a “political stunt,” and whose policy changes consistently make the documentation of abuse harder, not the abuse itself less frequent.