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The White House withdrew Lance Schroyer's nomination to lead ICE on September 17 without giving a public reason, and no replacement has been named.
- Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rand Paul had withheld a confirmation hearing while pressing the administration for records on two fatal shootings by federal agents in Minneapolis.
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ICE has operated without a Senate-confirmed director since 2017, and arrests under the agency climbed to nearly 51,000 in August, the highest monthly count of Trump's second term.
White House Scraps the Pick, Offers No Explanation
President Donald Trump's search for a permanent boss at Immigration and Customs Enforcement is back to square one. A brief notice posted to the White House's own website on Thursday confirmed that Lance Schroyer's nomination had been pulled and no rationale accompanied the announcement. Reporters seeking comment came away empty-handed; NPR noted the administration did not respond to its inquiries either.
A State Trooper With No Federal Immigration Record
Schroyer's path to the shortlist was unusual from the outset. He currently works as a senior adviser inside the Department of Homeland Security under Secretary Markwayne Mullin, but had never held a post at ICE before Trump tapped him in June, according to Al Jazeera. Announcing the choice on Truth Social, Trump pointed to Schroyer's long career on the Oklahoma Highway Patrol and wrote that his pick had "firsthand experience getting Illegal Aliens OFF our streets." Two U.S. officials told Reuters at the time that the selection came as a surprise, and skeptics from both parties questioned whether a state-level officer with no federal immigration-enforcement background was suited to run an agency of ICE's size.
The nomination never advanced to a committee vote. It sat inside the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which never scheduled a confirmation hearing before the withdrawal became public. The holdup traced to the panel's chairman, Kentucky Republican Rand Paul, who had tied any hearing to the administration first handing over records on fatal shootings carried out by federal agents. Paul later insisted the dispute had nothing to do with Schroyer personally, telling the Associated Press: "I don't have a concern with who the nominee was." By his own account, Paul learned the nomination had been scrapped only after the White House announced it — the hearing he had planned to hold never materialized.
Two Minneapolis Deaths Sit at the Center of the Standoff
The records Paul was chasing trace back to a violent stretch of ICE's enforcement surge in the Minneapolis–St. Paul area earlier this year. On January 7, an ICE officer fatally shot Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, an encounter her wife described publicly while top administration officials called it self-defense and state and local leaders rejected that account. Roughly two and a half weeks later, on January 24, federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse, in an incident captured on video that his family says contradicts the government's version of events. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison and Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty have accused federal authorities of shutting state investigators out of both cases, and in March they sued the Department of Justice and DHS to force the release of evidence — a fight still unresolved months later. Those open questions, more than anything in Schroyer's résumé, appear to be what froze the confirmation process.
Whatever comes next, ICE's top office has effectively run on autopilot for years. The agency has not had a Senate-confirmed director since 2017, near the end of the Obama administration, leaving a rotating cast of acting officials in charge ever since. The most recent, Todd Lyons, retired in May, and David Venturella — a former private-prison industry executive — is expected to keep running the agency's day-to-day operations for now. No new nominee has been named.
Enforcement Hasn't Slowed Down
Politically messy as the episode is, it hasn't dented ICE's enforcement pace. The agency's budget, north of $75 billion, remains the largest of any law-enforcement body in the country, backed by a Republican-controlled Congress intent on funding the administration's deportation agenda. Arrests kept climbing through the summer, reaching nearly 51,000 in August — the highest single-month total of Trump's second term. Mullin, who took over DHS in March, has tried to distance himself from the tactics behind the Minneapolis shootings and pledged a lower-profile enforcement posture after the aggressive street operations drew widespread backlash. The arrest numbers suggest that shift hasn't meaningfully slowed the pace of removals.
For now, the standoff leaves ICE exactly where it has stood for years: run without permanent, Senate-vetted leadership, its operations expanding even as oversight questions pile up. Whether the administration moves quickly on a replacement or lets the acting arrangement continue indefinitely will likely hinge on whether DHS finally satisfies Paul's committee — the same unresolved issue that sank Schroyer's chances before he ever got a hearing.
