(NEWARK, N.J.) -- Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin amped up his threats Thursday to pull Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents who process international passengers at Newark Liberty International Airport to help control protesters outside of New Jersey's Delaney Hall detention center.
Mullin continued to slam the protests, now in their seventh day, outside the Immigration Customs and Enforcement detention center over reports of poor living conditions and poor health among its 300 detainees. DHS has denied the allegations.
ICE agents have clashed with protesters who attempted to block vehicles from entering, prompting the federal agents to use pepper spray and batons against them.
Mullin told "Fox & Friends" on Thursday that DHS needed to "prioritize federal police officers" in response to the protests and is considering pulling CBP agents from the airport to help agents outside the detention facility, which would delay processing international travelers and cargo.
"That may effect international flights coming in and out of their airport because I'm going to have to pull Customs and Border Protection officers out of being able to process international flights and put them helping our ICE agents," he said.
"By the way, if you can't process international flights because Customs is closed, you can't obviously process international flights coming in from out of country," he added.
Mullin said on Fox News that if "things don't change" he'll have to make the move "pretty quick."
"We are not going to halt the flights, we won't be able to process them because we won't have officers there," he said. "We will have to pull out our Customs and Border Patrol officers that process these flights and put them in these [detention] facilities to help protect our employees coming out to work."
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates Newark Liberty International, did not immediately comment on Mullin's proposal.
Mullin has long been teasing a plan to pull CBP officers from airports that are in so-called "sanctuary jurisdictions." On Wednesday, he said he is "drawing up plans."
However, Mullin's controversial proposal has received pushback from travel groups.
U.S. Travel Association, a group representing the country's travel industry, met with Mullin last week and expressed concerns about the plan to withdraw CBP officers from several cities.
"U.S. Travel believes such a move would have devastating consequences for the travel industry and communities that depend on international visitation," the group said in a statement Friday.
At least one Trump administration official has questioned such a policy.
Asked about the proposal in a congressional hearing last week, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said he wasn't familiar with Mullin's comments but said it wouldn't be a good idea to implement such a policy based on politics.
"I’d like to take a look at [Mullin's] comments and get the context and I’d even ask him a question of what he meant by that, but we have people from around the world and around the country that need to be able to fly into all different kinds of places. We shouldn’t shut down air travel in a state that doesn’t agree with our politics,” Duffy said.
The demonstrations at Delaney Hall continued Wednesday night and protesters again clashed with federal law enforcement.
Several Democratic Congress members, including New Jersey Sen. Corey Booker, have visited the detention center over the last week and say they have seen the decrepit conditions first hand.
"The stories I've gotten, especially from women inmates, about the access to medical attention, seemed unsatisfactory, if not downright dangerous to their conditions," Booker said Wednesday.
That same day, Mullin denied the allegations and the reports of a hunger strike inside the facility contending that there were "only a handful of individuals that was refusing to eat" because they allegedly wanted their "ethnic right food."
"Well, they can go back to their country and get whatever food they want," he told reporters.
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