Two months after President Donald Trump announced Lance Schroyer as his pick to permanently run Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the nominee still hasn't gotten a Senate confirmation hearing. Far from lobbying to speed things up, a number of people inside ICE's parent agency say they're just as happy to see the process stall, according to Politico's account of internal DHS conversations, corroborated independently by The Daily Beast.
Inside DHS, a shrug at the delay
Six unnamed officials described day-to-day operations as running smoothly under acting director Dave Venturella and said they'd rather keep him in place than install Schroyer. "We don't want him. We don't need him. Leave us alone," one official told Politico, arguing the agency was performing better than ever and didn't need outside direction, per a summary of the reporting.
Venturella, a former GEO Group executive with a long immigration-enforcement résumé stretching back to the Reagan-era Immigration and Naturalization Service, took over as acting director on June 1 after Todd Lyons stepped down, NPR reported ahead of the transition. He's also widely seen as aligned with White House border czar Tom Homan, who reportedly shares DHS insiders' reservations about handing Venturella's job to an outsider.
Rand Paul's price for a hearing
Sen. Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican who chairs the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, has declined to schedule Schroyer's hearing until the administration turns over more detail on how it is investigating the deaths of two American citizens shot by federal agents in Minneapolis last January. Renée Good was killed by an ICE agent on Jan. 7 after her car began moving toward officers surrounding it during a traffic stop; seventeen days later, Border Patrol officers fatally shot Alex Pretti, an intensive-care nurse who had stepped between an agent and a woman being forced to the ground, after pepper-spraying him at close range as he backed away.
Paul has kept the pressure on publicly for months. In a 60 Minutes interview in February, he argued the administration needed to rebuild public confidence rather than defend the shootings outright. He later used hearing footage to challenge CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott directly: "No one in America believes shoving that woman's face in the snow was deescalation," Paul said, referring to a separate agent's takedown of a bystander moments before Pretti was shot.
The standoff is sharpened by a structural gap in oversight: FBI field offices were told in July to stop investigating assault claims involving immigration agents — including cases where those claims precede a shooting — and to hand those probes to Homeland Security Investigations, a unit that sits inside ICE itself, according to CBS News. The Justice Department and DHS have both denied any formal policy change took place. Either way, without the FBI's independent review, DHS's internal account is effectively the only record of what happened in both shootings — which is exactly the gap Paul says he wants closed before Schroyer gets his hearing.
The résumé DHS insiders are picking apart
Trump introduced Schroyer, a nearly three-decade Oklahoma law enforcement veteran and former Marine, as someone who built the state-federal 287(g) partnerships that link local troopers to ICE, according to the nomination announcement. The numbers behind that framing come from two different tallies: the Oklahoma Highway Patrol credits him with 26 years at that agency alone, from 2000 until his retirement this past May, while the White House's "29 years" adds in roughly three years he spent at the Tulsa Police Department before joining the Highway Patrol, according to reporting that cites DHS's own account of his career.
What's missing from that résumé, critics say, is ICE-specific experience. Mike Howell, president of the conservative watchdog Oversight Project, told Politico that Schroyer's thin deportation record undercuts the case for him: "It's kind of odd to have a similar person as the head of ICE," Howell said, arguing that pairing a non-enforcement DHS secretary with a non-enforcement ICE director sends a mixed signal, per an outlet's write-up of the exchange.
The advisor who reports to his old boss
The résumé questions are compounded by who Schroyer works for now. He currently serves as Senior Advisor to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin — not simply "a fellow Oklahoman" but the Cabinet official confirmed to the DHS secretary's post on March 24, 2026, succeeding Kristi Noem. The two have a personal history that predates the Cabinet job: Schroyer once worked Mullin's security detail while Mullin was still a senator, Yahoo News reported, and Mullin has been described as personally pushing Schroyer for the ICE post.
That closeness is fueling some of the internal grumbling. One official told Politico the pick fell short of what "the most important job in the admin that remains unfilled" demands, according to a report on the exchange.
The White House isn't pushing either
Despite Trump's public enthusiasm — he urged the Senate to "CONFIRM Lance, IMMEDIATELY" the day of the announcement — the West Wing hasn't visibly pressed Paul to move faster, effectively tolerating the hold, according to Politico. A White House official said Schroyer "remains President Trump's nominee to lead ICE" and cautioned against reading too much into the Senate calendar, while a DHS spokesperson said the department "stands firmly behind" the pick, according to statements given to reporters.
If eventually confirmed, Schroyer would be the first Senate-approved ICE director since Sarah Saldaña left the post in January 2017 — nearly a decade of acting leadership at an agency now at the center of the administration's deportation push, CBS News reported. For now, there's no sign the vacancy will resolve anytime soon.
