Todd Lyons, the acting director of the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), will leave his position at the end of May. His departure was confirmed by the new Secretary of Homeland Security, Markwayne Mullin. Lyons led the federal agency that carried out President Donald Trump’s campaign of mass detentions and deportations during a year full of controversies over the actions of the agents under his command, criticized for their violent tactics, indiscriminate raids against immigrants, and the death of nearly fifty people in their custody between 2025 and 2026.
“Director Lyons has been a great leader of ICE and a key figure in helping the Trump Administration remove murderers, rapists, pedophiles, terrorists, and gang members from American communities. He revitalized an agency that had not been allowed to do its job for four years. Thanks to his leadership, American communities are safer,” Secretary Mullin wrote on X. “We wish him luck in his next stage in the private sector. His last day is May 31, 2026.”
In a resignation letter addressed to Mullin, Lyons said it had been a “tremendous honor” to lead the agency, but he had decided to leave to “spend more time” with his family. “My children are both reaching a crucial moment in their lives, and my wife and I want to spend as much time as possible with them,” he wrote in the letter, according to national media reports.
Lyons, who was appointed acting director in March 2025, led ICE at a time of rapid expansion to please the Trump Administration. Under his leadership, the agency received a historic funding boost thanks to the president’s tax reform, approved last summer, money with which it more than doubled its agent staff, increased the number of beds available in detention centers across the country, and raised the number of arrests to historic highs. Although Lyons has always defended that his agents have detained “the worst of the worst,” migrants with criminal records, official data show that the vast majority of those arrested under his leadership have no criminal records.
Furthermore, in the year he has been in charge of ICE, a record number of detainees have died in migrant centers. These facilities, denounced for their poor conditions — lack of adequate food, insufficient hygiene, overcrowding — saw at least 31 deaths in 2025, the highest number in two decades. So far this year, at least 17 have died. According to a report published this week in the scientific journal of the American Medical Association, JAMA, the mortality rate in ICE centers was 88.9 in January, almost double that of the previous year and even above the peak of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, which was 75.6.
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Although Lyons’ agency fell short of the goal to deport one million people in the first year of Trump’s second term, deportations also reached historic peaks: in fiscal year 2025, ICE expelled 442,637 people, 63% more than the previous fiscal year.
Pressure for Lyons to resign has increased since January, when federal agents deployed in Minneapolis shot and killed two U.S. citizens, Renée Good and Alex Pretti, who were protesting against the mega immigration operation launched in the city and other parts of Minnesota by the White House. Good, a poet and mother of three, aged 37, was shot by an ICE agent, while Pretti was shot by Border Patrol agents, the other immigration agency under the Department of Homeland Security.
When Lyons testified before Congress after the shootings, he refused to apologize to the families of Good and Pretti. He also would not say whether he agreed with the Trump Administration’s claims that the U.S. citizens killed by agents were “domestic terrorists.” The events in Minneapolis also hastened the departure of former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, whom Trump dismissed in March and replaced with Markwayne Mullin.
It is unknown who will replace Lyons at the head of ICE, or if his departure implies a change of direction or strategy for ICE under Mullin’s Department of Homeland Security. The secretary, who took office less than a month ago, has focused on renewing the department’s image, plagued by criticism and controversies, at the center of Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda. However, he has committed to carrying out the mass deportations that the president so promises.
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