White House Withdraws Trump's Nominee to Lead ICE, Ending Stalled Confirmation Bid

The White House on Thursday withdrew President Trump's nomination of Lance Schroyer to lead U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ending a three-month confirmation effort that never reached a Senate hearing. No explanation was given.

The withdrawal was formalized in a routine notice to the Senate, one of five nominations the administration pulled back Thursday. It listed Richard "Lance" Schroyer, of Oklahoma, among the names, without stating a reason for the reversal. The same notice withdrew nominations for a Farm Credit Administration board seat, an Education Department inspector general post, a development-finance agency deputy chief executive and an ambassadorial-rank seat on the International Civil Aviation Organization council, underscoring that Thursday's batch was routine business rather than a single targeted purge. Schroyer did not immediately comment, and the Department of Homeland Security did not explain the decision.

A Nomination That Never Got a Hearing

Trump named Schroyer, a former Oklahoma state trooper with 29 years in law enforcement, to the post on June 27. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, himself a former Oklahoma congressman, called him a close ally with "strong leadership and firsthand experience" running Oklahoma's federal-state immigration enforcement partnership, in a statement announcing the pick. Schroyer had most recently served as a senior adviser to Mullin at DHS.

The formal nomination, recorded on the Senate's executive calendar as replacing Sarah R. Saldña, shows just how long the position has sat empty. Saldña was the last Senate-confirmed ICE director, leaving the post in January 2017. In the nine years since, the agency has been run entirely by a rotating cast of acting chiefs: Thomas Homan and then Ronald Vitiello during Trump's first term, Matthew Albence and Tony Pham later in that term, Tae Johnson and Patrick Lechleitner under President Biden, and Todd Lyons and now Dave Venturella since Trump returned to office. Vitiello's own nomination to the job was withdrawn in April 2019, when Trump told reporters he wanted to go "in a tougher direction." Had Schroyer been confirmed, he would have been the first Senate-approved director in nearly a decade.

How We Got Here

The nomination stalled almost from the start. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, declined to schedule a confirmation hearing until the administration turned over more information about federal investigations into the killings of two American citizens by immigration agents in Minneapolis in January.

Renée Good, 37, was fatally shot on Jan. 7 by an ICE officer during an operation local authorities called Operation Metro Surge, after agents surrounded her car and she began driving forward as one officer stood near the front of the vehicle. Seventeen days later, on Jan. 24, Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse who was filming agents and had stepped in as one sprayed a chemical irritant at a bystander, was shot multiple times by Border Patrol and Customs and Border Protection officers. The Hennepin County medical examiner ruled his death a homicide the following week, and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced days after the shooting that the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division and the FBI, not DHS's own investigators, would lead a federal civil rights inquiry, telling reporters the department was "looking at everything that would shed light on what happened."

Paul had pressed the administration on the shootings for months, including in a February appearance on CBS's "60 Minutes," where he said video evidence contradicted the government's account of the encounters.

"I want ICE to function, but I want to restore trust in ICE," Paul told CBS News.

That standoff over the Minneapolis cases became entangled with a separate, longer-running personal feud between Paul and Mullin, which dates to a Mullin remark that he understood why a neighbor had assaulted Paul at his Kentucky home in 2017, and to Mullin's later reference to Paul as a "snake" to a group of Oklahoma constituents. The dispute resurfaced publicly at Mullin's own DHS confirmation hearing, when Paul confronted him over the comments and over a separate episode in which Mullin, then a House member, challenged a labor union leader to a fight during a congressional hearing; Paul ultimately voted against Mullin's confirmation. Once Mullin became DHS secretary and chose Schroyer, a fellow Oklahoman, as his ICE pick, Schroyer's nomination had little room to move once it reached the committee Paul chairs.

Resistance Inside the Agency

The nominee also drew unusually public resistance from within DHS itself. Current and former officials at the department told Politico they viewed Schroyer, who has no experience running a federal law enforcement agency, as unqualified for a post overseeing tens of thousands of employees and a budget swollen by this year's immigration enforcement funding, and said they preferred that acting Director Dave Venturella simply keep the job, according to accounts of that reporting. Officials described Schroyer as Mullin's personal pick rather than a deportation-enforcement veteran.

What Happens Next

ICE continues to operate under Venturella, a former agency official who spent more than a decade at the private prison contractor GEO Group before returning to DHS this year, and whose appointment as acting director in June drew its own conflict-of-interest questions from Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee, given GEO Group's detention contracts with ICE. The administration's mass-deportation campaign proceeds regardless, without a Senate-confirmed leader in place. The vacancy comes as the agency's resources have grown sharply: Congress steered roughly $75 billion to ICE through last year's budget reconciliation law and added another $38.5 billion this year, funding available through September 2029 in what supporters and critics alike have called the largest immigration-enforcement funding surge in the agency's history.

The White House has not said whether or when it will name a new nominee, and Paul's committee has given no indication its underlying demand — a full accounting of the Minneapolis shootings — has been met. Until it is, any successor is likely to face the same holdup that ended Schroyer's bid.