Without offering an explanation, the White House announced this Thursday in a brief statement the withdrawal of its candidate for director of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service (ICE), Richard Lance Schroyer.
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Schroyer’s nomination, announced by President Donald Trump only in June, had been stalled in Congress. The chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Republican Rand Paul, requested more information from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) about the investigation against two ICE and Border Patrol agents accused of killing two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis in January. Since then, the date of his confirmation hearing has been in limbo.
Meanwhile, Schroyer had been serving as an advisor to the Secretary of Homeland Security, Markwayne Mullin. According to reports from the newspaper The Washington Post, the former police officer was also supporting an initiative by the Oklahoma Highway Patrol − where he worked − to train its more than 700 agents in the enforcement of immigration laws and cooperation with ICE in the detention of undocumented immigrants.
Schroyer’s nomination to lead ICE was surprising. But the delay in his confirmation was not. This is because he has no experience in leading federal law enforcement agencies, much less one as significant as ICE.
Press reports have stated that his nomination was motivated by his closeness to Markwayne Mullin (a former senator from Oklahoma between 2023 and 2026), who was confirmed by the Senate as head of DHS at the end of March 2026.
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For that reason, the White House announcement to withdraw Schroyer’s nomination is seen as a setback for Mullin, who has also been criticized by hardline Republicans in the party who consider his decisions insufficient to advance the immigrant deportation campaign on the scale promoted by Trump.
Since the president returned to power, the violent tactics employed by ICE to detain immigrants have been a constant controversy. The country has taken to protesting, especially in cities where strong operations have been deployed and some of them have resulted in the death of migrants.
But during the time Mullin has held the position, the federal agency has shown growth in detention figures never seen before. For example, by July nearly 50,000 people had been detained, according to data collected by the Deportation Data Project following public information requests to the federal agency. A historic record.
ICE has not succeeded in confirming a nominee as director since 2017. For now, the agency is being led on an interim basis by David Venturella, a former ICE agent who has been questioned for having worked as a manager for one of the largest private prison and ICE detention center companies in the United States, GEO Group.
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