A U.S. Coast Guard aircraft carrying Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin lost an engine mid-flight Wednesday and had to divert to Reagan National Airport, aboard a plane the department itself had flagged over its age.
Mullin was flying from Georgia to Washington, D.C., on a Coast Guard C101 when the aircraft suffered an engine failure, Fox News Digital reported. Coast Guard pilots diverted the plane to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Virginia and brought it down on a single engine.
No injuries were reported in the immediate aftermath, but the incident raises pointed questions about the condition of the government aircraft ferrying senior cabinet officials, especially since DHS itself had raised concerns about the C101's age the previous year.
Mullin posted about the incident on X shortly after landing. His account credited the Coast Guard crew with a textbook performance under pressure:
"The United States Coast Guard pilots made the single-engine landing feel routine. No panic, just straight professionalism. After we landed, the pilots told me that was a first for them! We could not have been in better hands."
That detail, the pilots telling the DHS secretary it was their first single-engine landing, underscores both the skill of the crew and the seriousness of the situation. A single-engine landing in a twin-engine aircraft is a trained emergency procedure, but executing one for the first time with a cabinet member aboard is not a routine Wednesday.
DHS had flagged the C101 aircraft last year because of its age. What "flagged" meant in practice, whether the plane was slated for replacement, scheduled for additional maintenance, or simply noted in an internal review, remains unclear. The department has not released further details on what action, if any, followed that designation.
The cause of the engine failure has not been disclosed. Nor has the government said how many people were aboard the aircraft at the time, or whether the plane has been grounded pending inspection.
The former Oklahoma senator took the helm at DHS during a period of aggressive enforcement action by the Trump administration. Mullin has positioned himself as one of the administration's most combative figures on immigration, floating proposals that have drawn pushback not just from the left but from within the president's own cabinet.
In one high-profile episode, Mullin proposed halting U.S. Customs and Border Protection processing at airports in so-called sanctuary cities, jurisdictions that limit cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. The plan, which he first raised in an April Fox News interview and pressed again in a May 13 meeting with airline and travel industry leaders, targeted major airports in New York City, Newark, Philadelphia, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Seattle, and San Francisco. Around 50 million international travelers passed through New York City's three main airports alone in 2025, giving some sense of the scale involved.
The airline industry pushed back hard. Airlines for America, the major trade group, warned that "reducing CBP staffing at major airports would have a devastating effect on the airline and tourism industries, causing a significant operational disruption to carriers, travelers and the flow of international cargo."
Even Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, a fellow Trump appointee, publicly broke with the idea. Duffy told reporters, "We shouldn't shut down air travel in a state that doesn't agree with our politics." That a member of the same administration felt compelled to say so publicly speaks to how far Mullin was willing to push the enforcement envelope.
The emergency landing puts a spotlight on the aircraft the federal government uses to move its most senior officials. The Coast Guard's fleet has long faced scrutiny over aging airframes, and the fact that DHS itself had already raised concerns about this particular plane makes the engine failure harder to dismiss as a freak event.
Several basic questions remain open. What was Mullin doing in Georgia before the flight? What triggered the engine failure? Has the C101 been pulled from service? And what, exactly, did DHS do after flagging the aircraft's age, did anyone act on the warning, or did it sit in a file?
Fox News Digital noted the story was still developing at the time of publication.
When a department flags one of its own planes as too old and that plane then loses an engine with the department's boss on board, somebody owes the public an answer about what happened between the warning and the failure.
