The White House on Thursday withdrew President Trump’s nominee to lead Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), leaving the agency at the center of the administration’s mass-deportation campaign without a Senate-confirmed director less than three months after the administration announced the pick.
The nominee, Lance Schroyer, a former Oklahoma state trooper, was listed among a batch of withdrawn nominations posted to the White House website, and the administration gave no public reason for the reversal, according to The Washington Post and The New York Times.
Behind the terse notice was a nomination that had been unraveling for weeks.
Schroyer’s confirmation stalled after Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, the Republican chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee and a rival of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, pressed the department for more information about its internal investigation into two ICE and Border Patrol agents accused of fatally shooting two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis in January, Bloomberg and Politico reported. Paul had declined to move the nomination toward a hearing.
The standoff was striking on its own terms: a nominee put forward by a Republican president, stopped in a Senate his own party controls. Paul, a frequent critic of the Department of Homeland Security who has clashed repeatedly with Mullin, used his committee gavel to withhold the hearing Schroyer needed, tying the nomination to the agency’s account of how two U.S. citizens came to be killed by federal agents. With no path to the votes, the administration chose to pull the plug rather than force the issue, the reporting indicated.
Schroyer was an unusual choice from the outset.
A U.S. Marine with more than 29 years in Oklahoma law enforcement, he had never worked at ICE, had no background in immigration enforcement, and had never run a large agency, gaps that drew skepticism from immigration hardliners and even some Homeland Security officials, CNN reported. His route to the nomination ran through Mullin.
Schroyer had served on the secretary’s security detail when Mullin was a senator and, as the Washington Examiner reported, was “carrying his briefcase” before being abruptly elevated to senior adviser at the department. Mullin, who settled on Schroyer after an earlier choice caused friction with some White House officials, called him “a good friend of mine” at a law-enforcement gathering this year, CNN reported.
When he announced the selection in late June, Trump was effusive, writing on social media that Schroyer, like the president and Mullin, “loves the men and women of ICE,” according to The New York Times. Less than three months later, the nomination was gone before Schroyer ever sat for a confirmation hearing.
The withdrawal leaves ICE, a force of more than 20,000 personnel now operating on a sharply enlarged budget, without a Senate-confirmed leader —a vacancy that stretches back to 2017. Day-to-day command remains with the acting director, David Venturella, a former ICE official who also spent time with a private prison company, the Times reported. The agency’s difficulty installing a confirmed chief is long-running: an earlier nominee in Trump’s first term, Ronald Vitiello, was also withdrawn before he could be confirmed.
The leadership gap comes at the most aggressive moment in the agency’s recent history.
Under Mullin, ICE has posted record arrest figures, including a five-day stretch over the summer in which roughly 10,000 people were taken into custody, according to the Times, with monthly arrests exceeding 50,000 in both July and August. Those operations have drawn protests and pushback from local officials in cities around the country, and the January shootings in Minneapolis that helped sink Schroyer’s nomination remain under review.
The collapse of the nomination before a single hearing also prompted pointed questions in Washington about how a little-known candidate with no immigration experience advanced so far, and about the judgment of the secretary who had elevated him. Mullin, a former Oklahoma senator confirmed to the Cabinet post in March, has become one of the most visible faces of the administration’s immigration agenda — and, with Schroyer’s failure, one now facing scrutiny over his own picks.
For now, ICE continues under acting leadership, and the White House has not indicated whom it might nominate next.
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