Trump Nominates Lance Schroyer for ICE, a Post Vacant Since 2017

For most of the past decade, the agency at the center of America's immigration fights has been run by people no one in the Senate ever voted to confirm. President Trump now wants to change that, and he has picked a former Oklahoma state trooper to do it.

In a statement posted Saturday on Truth Social, Trump said he is nominating Lance Schroyer as director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He cited Schroyer's 29 years in Oklahoma law enforcement and his service in the Marine Corps, calling him a PATRIOT with real operational experience and a proven leader with DECADES of experience locking up the worst of the worst. Schroyer currently works as a senior adviser to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, who comes from the same state and brought him into the department.

The nomination matters less for the man than for the chair he would fill. ICE has not had a Senate-confirmed director since the end of the Obama administration, according to CBS News; in the years since, roughly a dozen people have led it in an acting capacity. Mullin, urging the Senate to move quickly, put the drought at 11 years. That is the procedural reality Schroyer steps into: a permanent job that has been functionally temporary for a very long time.

He inherits an agency that is both far larger and far more contested than the one those past directors ran. A one-time injection of $75 billion last year paid for about 12,000 new officers and expanded detention space, according to the Associated Press. That growth turned ICE into the primary engine of Trump's deportation push, and it arrives as public sentiment toward the crackdown has cooled. The raids drove tensions in several cities and, the AP reported, preceded the fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis earlier this year.

Schroyer's background is a departure from the usual mold. Confirmed ICE directors have often been attorneys, noted Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former senior ICE official, who said the pick of an Oklahoma operator points to Mullin's hand in it. I think probably given the attention on ICE, he wants to feel like he has somebody he can trust in there, she told the AP. Another former senior official, John Torres, said the state-and-local résumé could cut both ways at a confirmation hearing. He won't have any of that baggage, where they're going to turn around and say, oh, well, he worked for this administration or that, Torres said.

Mullin made the case himself on the platform where the nomination first landed.

Statement from Secretary Markwayne Mullin on the Schroyer nomination

Until the Senate acts, the day-to-day will not change hands. David Venturella, who took over as acting chief on June 1 after Todd Lyons left the agency this spring, is expected to keep running ICE until a confirmation vote, NPR reported. Whether the Senate moves at all is the open question; the same polarization that has kept the directorship vacant for years has not eased, and ICE is only more central to the country's arguments now than it was when the post first went empty.

The nomination lands in the same week the courts handed the administration room to press its agenda, after the Supreme Court cleared the way to end deportation protections for hundreds of thousands of migrants. Schroyer's hearing, if it comes, will be where the politics of all that enforcement finally gets a name and a face to question.