ICE chief Todd Lyons to leave, creating leadership void amid deportation push

Todd Lyons is set to leave U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the end of May, opening a leadership gap at the center of President Donald Trump’s deportation push. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin confirmed that May 31 will be Lyons’s last official day, ending a brief tenure as acting ICE director in one of the most politically charged jobs in the federal government.

Lyons’s departure matters less as a personnel change than as an institutional test. ICE has had no Senate-confirmed director since early 2017 and has cycled through a dozen acting chiefs in nearly a decade, a pattern that has left the agency reliant on temporary leadership while its enforcement role has expanded and sharpened public scrutiny. Lyons, who was named acting director in March 2025, oversaw an agency of more than 27,400 personnel with an annual budget of nearly $10 billion, plus more than $74 billion in funding tied to the One Big Beautiful Act.

Before taking the top job, Lyons ran Enforcement and Removal Operations, the arm responsible for arrests, detention and deportations. That post put him over more than 8,600 employees across 25 field offices, more than 200 domestic locations and 25 overseas locations. He joined ICE in 2007 as an immigration enforcement agent in Dallas after military service in South Korea, Southeast Asia and Europe, then moved through posts in Dallas, Boston and headquarters over two decades in the agency.

Lyons’s exit also comes as ICE remains a flashpoint in the administration’s effort to carry out mass deportations. He publicly embraced Trump’s crackdown, even as critics accused the administration of heavy-handed tactics that have drawn civil-liberties concerns and backlash in cities such as Minneapolis. In Massachusetts, Gov. Maura Healey has moved to curtail some ICE operations, underscoring the clash between federal enforcement and state-level resistance.

The next director, and the way Mullin chooses that successor, will signal whether DHS is looking for continuity or a recalibration. A career ICE operator could preserve Lyons’s enforcement-first approach, while a different pick might suggest an effort to change how the agency is managed under intense political pressure. Lyons’s own record has included controversy, including a Minnesota federal judge ordering him to court over ICE’s refusal to release a wrongly detained Ecuadorean man before the agency complied. His departure leaves the department to decide not only who runs ICE next, but how aggressively the government intends to carry out its immigration agenda.