The Trump administration is openly considering using federal customs authority as a weapon against American cities — pulling international flights from Newark, New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Philadelphia in retaliation for protests against an ICE jail. Days before the World Cup. With nothing in the way except whatever shame this administration still has left.
On Tuesday, May 26, on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin announced that the Trump administration is “drawing up plans” to stop processing international flights at airports in so-called sanctuary cities. The trigger was not a threat from abroad. It was a protest at home — demonstrators outside Delaney Hall, a privately operated ICE detention center in Newark, New Jersey, where Senator Andy Kim of New Jersey had been engulfed in pepper spray the day before while attempting to broker a de-escalation between federal agents and protesters. Mullin’s response was not to investigate the conditions inside the facility, not to engage with the lawmakers raising alarms, but to threaten the airline arrivals of New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Philadelphia, Denver, and Newark itself — eight of the busiest international gateways in the United States, handling nearly 74 million international travelers a year between them.
The reasoning Mullin offered on Hannity was direct, and worth quoting in full:
“In these sanctuary cities where the local, radical-left Democrats aren’t allowing us to do our jobs and enforce federal laws, then we shouldn’t be processing international flights into their cities either. They don’t want us to enforce immigration but they want us to process immigration at their facilities? Nothing about that makes sense to me.”
This was not a slip. It was not a private musing. It was a stated administration policy direction, delivered in prime-time, weeks before the United States co-hosts the FIFA World Cup. And it confirms what every recent week of this presidency has confirmed: the federal government’s powers, in this administration’s hands, are not instruments of public service. They are instruments of personal grievance.
1. The Threat, Stated Plainly: A Federal Function Repurposed as a Cudgel
What Mullin proposed is not, strictly speaking, a “ban” on international flights. It is something more cynical: a withdrawal of Customs and Border Protection officers from the airports that serve cities the administration dislikes. Without CBP, those airports cannot legally accept international arrivals. The flights would not be diverted to other cities. As industry analysts have made clear, the flights would simply be canceled outright. CNN reported that some Trump officials have privately acknowledged the havoc the plan could wreak. The industry has acknowledged it publicly. Henry Harteveldt, the airline analyst, told NewsNation it “would paralyze or come close to paralyzing international travel in and out of the U.S. and it would be an economic debacle.”
The cities at risk are the ones identified on the Justice Department’s published sanctuary list: New York, Newark, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Philadelphia, and Denver. Newark Liberty alone handled 24.5 million international passengers last year. JFK, LAX, O’Hare, and SFO are among the largest international hubs in the Western Hemisphere. The collateral damage is not a side effect of the policy. It is the policy. The administration is offering a transparent extortion: change your local immigration practices, or we will sever your city from the rest of the world.
The White House response was not a denial. A White House official told ABC News that “the President loves having a team that is constantly coming up with new ideas but ultimately any policy decisions will be up to him.” That is not reassurance. That is a confession.
2. The Spark: What Is Actually Happening at Delaney Hall
To understand the threat, understand the trigger. Delaney Hall is a 1,000-bed for-profit immigration jail in Newark, operated by the private prison company GEO Group, that opened in spring 2025 and was sited — by the company’s own admission and Newark’s lawsuit — specifically because of its proximity to Newark Liberty Airport, to facilitate rapid deportation flights. The City of Newark has been challenging whether GEO Group secured the proper municipal permits to open at all. In May 2025, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka was arrested by federal agents while protesting outside the facility.
The situation escalated this spring. Detainees inside Delaney Hall began a hunger and labor strike to protest what they have described as spoiled and rotten food, undrinkable water, withheld medical care, and severe overcrowding. The Intercept reported that ICE responded by shutting off detainees’ phone access, transferring strike leaders to other facilities, and deploying pepper spray and batons against nonviolent protesters inside the jail. New Jersey health officials were denied a full inspection. Governor Mikie Sherrill was turned away from the facility. “This was raising serious questions about what they are trying to hide from public view,” she said.
On Monday, May 25, 2026, Senator Andy Kim attempted to broker a de-escalation outside the facility. The agreement on the table — agents pulling back tactical teams in exchange for advocates inspecting vehicles leaving the jail — collapsed when, according to reporting from NJ.com and The Daily Beast, ICE agents surged forward and fired pepper balls into the crowd. Kim was engulfed in chemical irritants. Video posted to social media shows him receiving water poured into his eyes. His office confirmed to Snopes that pepper pellets were fired directly in front of where he was standing. DHS’s official rebuttal carefully said only that “no individuals were directly struck by pepper ball projectiles” — a sentence that does not deny what happened.
“What I witnessed and experienced today was shameful,” Kim wrote afterward. “Delaney Hall is a failure; it’s this administration’s failure. The only way to make this right for our communities is to shut it down.”
That is the protest Markwayne Mullin watched on Fox News. That is the protest he cited as justification for proposing to cancel international flights into the eight largest blue-city airports in the country. Mullin’s own commentary on the detainees’ hunger strike was equally revealing. Pressed on what the strikers were demanding, he told reporters at a Cabinet meeting that “there were only a handful of individuals that was refusing to eat” because they allegedly wanted their “ethnic right food.” Then he added: “Well, they can go back to their country and get whatever food they want.” This is the Homeland Security Secretary of the United States, on camera, describing detainees in federal custody.
“Stop attacking our cities to hide your administration’s failures. Unlike the Trump administration, Boston follows the law, and Boston will not back down from who we are and what we stand for.”
— Mayor Michelle Wu, Boston
3. The Economic Body Blow: Who Actually Pays When the Government Holds the Sky Hostage
The notion that this policy punishes “radical-left Democrats” is the marketing copy. The reality is that this policy would punish every American who has ever booked a ticket to Europe, every business that ships internationally through a major U.S. hub, every hotel owner in a host city, every traveler trying to come home, and — pointedly — every voter regardless of party affiliation. A document Airlines for America presented to the White House warned that if a bottleneck were imposed at Newark — a major United Airlines connecting hub — the “disproportionate impacts to US citizens will hit heartland America far more than Newark itself.”
The trade group representing American, United, and Delta told the administration directly: this would have a “devastating effect on the airline and tourism industries.” The U.S. Travel Association — whose members include Hilton and Marriott — said the same. United CEO Scott Kirby reportedly placed a private call to Mullin to convey the disruptions. And all of this is happening with the FIFA World Cup arrivals literally weeks away, an event projected to draw 1.24 million international visitors to the United States.
This is the moral arithmetic the administration is asking America to accept: punish a hunger-striking detainee population for refusing to eat the food they are given, by canceling the vacations and business trips and family reunions of millions of Americans, by inflicting reputational damage on the United States at the precise moment the world is arriving for the largest sporting event in history, and by handing every U.S. airline a balance-sheet crisis. All of this — to retaliate against city governments that have made the democratic choice that their police officers will not function as a deportation arm of the federal government.
4. A Pattern, Not an Incident: The Escalating Use of Federal Power as Punishment
The flight threat does not exist in isolation. It is the latest entry in a steadily expanding logbook of episodes in which this administration has treated federal authority as a personal weapon — usable against governors, mayors, senators, judges, journalists, universities, and now ordinary travelers. The timeline matters because it shows that the airport proposal is not a rogue idea from a single Cabinet secretary. It is the predictable next step.
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The shape of this pattern is unmistakable. The administration is not adjusting policy in response to opposition; it is escalating reprisals in response to it. Boston Mayor Michelle Wu put it more directly than any press release: “Stop attacking our cities to hide your administration’s failures.” Wu and her counterparts in Chicago, New York, and Denver — Brandon Johnson, Eric Adams, and Mike Johnston — testified before Congress in March defending the constitutional and public-safety rationale for sanctuary policies. Their reward, three months later, is to be threatened with the closure of their airports.
Juliette Kayyem, a former DHS official under President Obama, called the proposal one of the top-ranking “bad ideas” of the Trump administration. “The flights will be cancelled, disrupting blue and red voters, impacting the airlines, and having no impact on immigration policy,” she wrote. She also stated her belief that the administration will move forward with it anyway. That last sentence is the one that matters. Almost no one outside the administration believes this is a good idea. Almost no one outside the administration believes that the administration cares.
When the Drafters Said “Unable,” They Meant It to Cover Exactly This.
Section 4 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment permits the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet to declare to Congress that the President is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” at which point the Vice President immediately becomes Acting President. The amendment never defines “unable.” It never defines “inability.” This was deliberate. As legal scholars told PBS NewsHour, the drafters used intentionally open-ended language because they recognized they could not anticipate every form a presidential incapacity might take. They wrote a constitutional provision flexible enough to meet the moment. This is the moment.
The argument is not that the President has had a stroke. The argument is that a President who threatens, on national television, to cancel international flights at the eight largest sanctuary-city airports — in retaliation for a protest at an immigrant detention center — is exhibiting an inability to distinguish between the constitutional powers of his office and the management of his personal grudges. This is not the conduct of someone discharging “the powers and duties” of the presidency. It is the conduct of someone wielding them as a private weapon.
“The 25th Amendment exists for a reason. The President of the United States is a deranged lunatic, and a national security threat to our country and the rest of the world.” — Rep. Yassamin Ansari (D-AZ)
The names matter. Rep. Jamie Raskin, ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, wrote to the White House physician in April demanding a comprehensive cognitive evaluation of the President, citing “increasingly incoherent, volatile, profane, deranged and threatening” public statements. Rep. Yassamin Ansari of Arizona and Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove of California have both publicly called for Section 4 invocation. In April, 36 leading physicians with mental-health expertise issued a statement calling for the President’s lawful removal on medical grounds; the statement was entered into the Congressional Record by Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Jack Reed of Rhode Island. A Reuters-Ipsos poll cited by CNN found that 61 percent of Americans, including 30 percent of Republicans, agree that the President “has become erratic with age.”
The honest assessment of practical barriers: Section 4 has never been formally invoked. It requires the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet — the very Cabinet that, in Mullin’s case, is generating the conduct in question. Republicans control both chambers of Congress, and a two-thirds vote of each would be required to sustain the removal if the President contests it. The political path is, for the moment, closed.
But the closed political path does not negate the constitutional case. The framers of the amendment understood that the most dangerous form of presidential inability would be the kind a sitting Cabinet refused to recognize. They wrote the language broadly precisely so that a future generation could not say: we lacked the words to describe what we were seeing. The words exist. “Unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office” describes — at minimum — a President who confuses the powers of his office with permission to retaliate against the cities and citizens who criticize him. The fact that the cure is currently unreachable does not mean the disease is misdiagnosed. It means we are watching the warning the amendment was written to give.
5. What This Says About Leadership: A Presidency That Mistakes the Office for a Grievance Machine
A functional presidency, confronted with footage of a sitting United States Senator being pepper-sprayed while attempting to broker peace at a detention facility in his own state, would inspect the facility. It would order an independent review of conditions. It would interview the detainees on hunger strike. It would not — could not — respond by proposing to cancel the international air routes of the country’s largest cities. The fact that this administration has selected the second option, and only the second option, tells us something important about its concept of governance: that federal authority exists to discipline disobedient Americans, not to serve them.
This is why the priorities are upside down. The administration has had nothing of substance to say about the rotten food, undrinkable water, withheld medication, or denied inspections at Delaney Hall. It has had nothing to say about the lawsuit Newark filed over the facility’s permits. It has had nothing to say about the medical professionals warning about presidential fitness. What it has had a great deal to say about is which mayors it will punish, which senators it will demean, which cities it will sever from the world economy, and which detainees can “go back to their country” if they don’t like the food they are being served in federal custody.
The cost of all this to the ordinary American is concrete and unromantic. A mother in Ohio with a connecting flight through Newark loses her trip to see her grandchildren in London. A small exporter in Tennessee who routes shipments through O’Hare watches his costs spike. A hotel worker in Boston watches the World Cup tourism evaporate. A retired couple in Arizona who saved for a tenth anniversary in Italy discovers their return flight to Phoenix has been canceled because their connection was through SFO. None of these people voted for sanctuary policies. None of them voted against them. They voted, most of them, expecting that the federal government would not be in the business of holding their travel hostage to a Cabinet secretary’s view of municipal cooperation. That expectation, until last week, was reasonable.
This is what unfitness looks like in the modern presidency. It does not always look like a man failing to recognize his own family. Sometimes it looks like a man so consumed by the desire to punish his critics that he is willing to ground the airline industry, hand the World Cup to chaos, embarrass the country in front of its closest allies, and detonate the trust of half his own voters — to settle a score with a protest two miles from an airport in New Jersey.
Editorial Conclusion
A President who threatens the international flights of his own country’s largest cities, weeks before that country welcomes the world for the World Cup, in retaliation for a peaceful protest outside an immigrant detention center, is not exercising the powers and duties of his office. He is announcing his inability to distinguish them from his grievances.
The Twenty-Fifth Amendment does not require a stroke. It requires honesty about what we are looking at. What we are looking at — visibly, audibly, on primetime television — is a federal government being used to punish American cities for the crime of disagreement. That is not a policy dispute. That is a constitutional emergency hiding inside a press hit.
Sanctuary cities did not break American government. A President who treats every disagreement as a target list is breaking American government. The democratic stakes are not partisan. They are whether the office of the presidency remains an office at all — or becomes, finally, a weapon held by one man against the country that elected him.
Sources & References
- TruthoutDHS Secretary Claims Plans Underway to Stop International Flights from Sanctuary Cities
- TimeDHS Threatens to Stop International Flight Processing in Sanctuary Cities
- CNN PoliticsMullin Plan to Punish Sanctuary Jurisdictions by Targeting Their Airports Faces Fierce Headwinds
- CNBCAirlines, Hotels Warn Against Trump Admin Threat to International Flights to Sanctuary Cities
- CNBCAirlines Urge Trump Administration Not to Curb International Flights in Sanctuary City Feud
- NewsNationInternational Flights Could Stop in Sanctuary Cities: DHS Boss Markwayne Mullin
- The HillMarkwayne Mullin Says DHS May Halt International Flight Processing in Sanctuary Cities
- Reuters via AOLDHS Says U.S. Could Stop Processing International Travelers at Some Airports in Sanctuary Cities
- ABC News“They Can Go Back to Their Country,” DHS Secretary Mullin Says as Tensions Rise Outside Newark ICE Facility
- The InterceptICE Pepper-Sprayed, Beat Detainees for Protesting “Horrific Conditions” in Delaney Hall
- The Daily BeastICE Agents Pepper-Spray Senator Andy Kim Amid Chaos at Delaney Hall
- SnopesWas Sen. Andy Kim Pepper-Sprayed by ICE at Protest Outside New Jersey Detention Facility?
- CNNFlashpoints and Fury: Inside Protests at a New Jersey ICE Facility
- PBS NewsHourCould the 25th Amendment Be Invoked Against Trump? Here’s How It Works
- National Constitution Center25th Amendment — Presidential Disability and Succession (Full Text)
- House Judiciary DemocratsRaskin Demands Cognitive Fitness Evaluation Amid Bipartisan Alarm, Calls to Invoke 25th Amendment
- TimeWhat to Know About the 25th Amendment as Lawmakers Call for Trump’s Removal
- IPPNWMedical Experts Declare President Trump Too Unstable to Remain in Office
- HuffPost via AOLBoston Mayor Wu to Trump: “Stop Attacking Our Cities to Hide Your Administration’s Failures”
- National Immigration ForumExplainer: Impact of Travel and Immigration Restrictions on the 2026 FIFA World Cup
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