Acting ICE director Todd Lyons resigns

Todd Lyons, the acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), will leave his post at the end of May. His departure was confirmed by the new Secretary of Homeland Security, Markwayne Mullin. Lyons has led the federal agency responsible for President Donald Trump’s mass‑detention and deportation campaign during a year marked by controversy over ICE operations. Agents under his command faced criticism for violent tactics, indiscriminate raids targeting immigrants, and the deaths of nearly 50 people in custody between 2025 and 2026.

“Director Lyons has been a great leader of ICE and key player in helping the Trump administration remove murderers, rapists, pedophiles, terrorists, and gang members from American communities. He jumpstarted an agency that had not been allowed to do its job for four years. Thanks to his leadership, American communities are safer,” Mullin posted on X. “We wish him luck on his next opportunity in the private sector. His last day is May 31, 2026.”

In a resignation letter to Mullin, Lyons said it had been a “tremendous honor” to lead the agency, but that he had decided to leave to “spend more time” with his family. “My sons are both reaching a pivotal point in their lives, and my wife and I wish to spend as much time as possible with them,” he wrote in the letter, according to national media reports.

Lyons, appointed acting director in March 2025, led ICE during a period of rapid expansion aimed at meeting the Trump administration’s priorities. Under his leadership, the agency received an unprecedented funding boost through the president’s tax overhaul passed last summer. With that money, ICE more than doubled its enforcement workforce, expanded the number of available beds in detention centers across the country, and increased arrests to record highs. Although Lyons has repeatedly argued that his agents target “the worst of the worst,” meaning migrants with criminal histories, official data shows that the vast majority of those detained during his tenure had no criminal history.

During Lyons’s year at the helm of ICE, the number of deaths in immigration detention reached record levels. Facilities long criticized for poor conditions — inadequate food, insufficient hygiene and overcrowding — saw at least 31 deaths in 2025, the highest figure in two decades. So far this year, at least 17 more people have died. According to a study published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), the mortality rate in ICE custody stood at 88.9 per 100,000 detainees in January, nearly double the previous year and higher than the peak recorded during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, which was 75.6.

Although the agency fell short of the Trump administration’s goal of deporting one million people in the first year of the president’s second term, removals still reached historic highs: in fiscal year 2025, ICE deported 442,637 people, a 63% increase from the previous year.

Pressure on Lyons to resign has mounted since January, when federal agents deployed in Minneapolis fatally shot two U.S. citizens — Renée Good and Alex Pretti — who were protesting a large‑scale immigration operation launched by the White House in the city and across Minnesota. Good, a 37‑year‑old poet and mother of three, was killed by an ICE agent; Pretti was shot by officers from Border Patrol, 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 declined to say whether he agreed with the Trump administration’s characterization of the two slain citizens as “domestic terrorists.” The events in Minneapolis also contributed to the ouster of former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, whom President Trump dismissed in March and replaced with Markwayne Mullin.

It remains unclear who will succeed Lyons at ICE or whether his departure signals a shift in direction under Mullin’s leadership. The new secretary, in office for less than a month, has focused on rehabilitating the department’s image, which has been mired in controversy and is at the center of the administration’s anti‑immigration agenda. Even so, Mullin has pledged to carry out the mass deportations that Trump has repeatedly promised.

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