Todd Lyons, the acting director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), is set to leave the agency at the end of May, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin announced on Thursday. Lyons, who has led the agency since March 2025, will move to the private sector, with his last day confirmed as 31 May. No successor has been named, and the DHS and White House did not immediately provide details on who would take over.

Lyons' tenure has been marked by controversy. He oversaw a dramatic expansion of ICE, which reported hiring roughly 12,000 officers and agents in under a year as part of the Trump administration's sweeping immigration enforcement push. The agency pursued what it described as a campaign to arrest "the worst of the worst", though an independent analysis found that the vast majority of people entering deportation proceedings for the first time in 2025 had no criminal conviction. Lyons also defended agents' use of masks in operations — a practice that drew concern given the difficulty it posed in identifying officers — and faced scrutiny over conditions in ICE detention facilities, including the large Dilley family detention centre in Texas.

Several specific incidents intensified pressure on Lyons. In January, ICE agents fatally shot two people, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, in Minneapolis. When called before Congress to address the killings, Lyons declined to apologise to the families or distance himself from the administration's characterisation of the victims — both US citizens — as "domestic terrorists", a claim widely condemned. A federal judge in Minnesota also threatened to hold Lyons in contempt for what he described as the administration's defiance of court orders related to immigration arrests, though Lyons ultimately did not have to testify.

Public opinion toward ICE has soured significantly during this period. A February poll found nearly two-thirds of Americans believed ICE had gone too far, while a March survey indicated that half of Americans would support abolishing the agency altogether. Even a Fox News poll showed six in ten voters disapproved of ICE's performance.

Despite the turbulence, administration officials offered warm praise upon his departure. Mullin called Lyons "a great leader of ICE" who had "jumpstarted an agency that had not been allowed to do its job for four years." Border czar Tom Homan and senior immigration policy architect Stephen Miller also released statements commending his service. ICE is the federal agency within the Department of Homeland Security responsible for immigration enforcement and deportations inside the United States.