Trump nominates Oklahoma lawman Lance Schroyer to lead ICE
Trump picked Oklahoma lawman Lance Schroyer to run ICE as the agency presses ahead with arrests and deportations under acting chief David J. Venturella.
President Donald Trump nominated Lance Schroyer on Saturday to lead U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, putting an Oklahoma law enforcement veteran in line to direct one of the administration’s most aggressive tools for immigration enforcement.
The choice fits the White House’s wider push to harden deportation policy through a leader with a policing background. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin praised the nomination the same day, underscoring how tightly ICE leadership is now tied to the politics of arrests, removals and interior enforcement.
ICE was created in 2003 from interior enforcement elements of the former U.S. Customs Service and the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The agency says it now has more than 20,000 law enforcement and support personnel in more than 400 offices in the United States and around the world, a reach that gives the director broad influence over detention, investigations and removals.
At the time of the nomination, Department of Homeland Security materials identified David J. Venturella as acting ICE director. That interim leadership comes after the Trump administration has leaned heavily on ICE to show results. In May 2025, DHS said the agency had reached its highest number of arrests in history at that point, and in June 2026 DHS said ICE had surpassed 10,000 gang-member arrests under Trump.
ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division says its mission is to arrest and remove people who undermine community safety and the integrity of immigration laws. A director with a law-enforcement pedigree signals a continuation of that approach, with an emphasis on enforcement discipline and operational expansion rather than a softer reset.
Oklahoma’s place in the Homeland Security map also gives the pick added weight. DHS Region 6 includes Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico and Texas, linking Schroyer’s home state to a multistate enforcement zone that sits at the center of immigration politics. If confirmed, Schroyer would take charge of an agency with far-reaching authority over who is detained, who is deported and how aggressively the federal government carries out Trump’s immigration agenda.
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