The next director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement will inherit an embattled agency that former senior ICE officials say needs leadership rooted in more than ideological alignment to President Donald Trump. 

According to former ICE Director John Sandweg, an effective director must have command of three fronts: the immigration system, law enforcement culture, and the political machinery of Washington. The last of those, he argued, is an area where ICE has sometimes “suffered,” because the agency does not understand the basics of how Washington operates. 

“Not only do you need to be able to explain to the White House or the policy makers at DHS, ‘hey, no, this won't work. Here's how we are going to do it.’ But then also you're prepared to manage the political elements of this,” Sandweg explained. “As soon as the warrants are executed…we're ready to explain to everybody what's going on. We also want to make sure that Congress is briefed as quickly as possible so that they're not surprised by it.”

The administration’s answer came not with fanfare, but with a muted confirmation from a spokesperson. On Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security confirmed David Venturella is expected to serve as the next acting ICE director. The announcement came weeks after Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin announced that Director Todd Lyons would resign on May 31. It is notable that Secretary Mullin didn’t announce Venturella's appointment himself, a departure from former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem’s high-profile approach that announced Lyons’ promotion to acting director in a statement in March last year.

Venturella was a longtime ICE official who quit the agency under the Obama administration to join GEO Group, a private prison company that often builds and manages immigration detention centers for ICE. According to the Washington Post, Venturella was hired back by the DHS in 2025 as a full-time adviser, overseeing the department’s contracts for immigrant detention centers while the department granted him a waiver from the ethics rule. 

His appointment came at a particularly precarious time for the immigration agency. Under Lyons’ tenure, ICE faced bipartisan criticism for carrying out Trump’s mass deportation agenda while expanding the law enforcement apparatus with less training and oversight. The killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota have led to a national reckoning on reforming ICE, which led to the nation’s longest partial government shutdown in history. 

“All of that, I think, has devastated ICE's reputation. I think it undermines ICE's ability to collaborate with state and local police departments and law enforcement in a way that really promotes public safety for all Americans,” said Sandweg. He added that catastrophic operations carried out under Noem were due in no small part to her lack of understanding of the immigration enforcement system, including her decision to put Border Patrol in charge of domestic deportation missions. 

“I think the way in which the former political leadership was doing things was disastrous for the agency, chasing out senior leaders who might have tempered more caution or restraint, or tried to explain why these types of operations weren't smart,” Sandweg said. “I don't get the sense that Todd Lyons was running a lot of the operations we saw, including in Minneapolis and other places.”

Managing ICE’s internal divide

The challenges under Lyons also point to a structural challenge that any ICE director must navigate: understanding the immigration enforcement system and the agency's law enforcement culture are inseparable. ICE is divided between two distinct and sometimes competing missions. Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), which handles transnational crime, human trafficking, and financial crimes, often finds itself at odds with Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), the deportation arm that has become the public face of Trump's immigration crackdown. 

Sandweg said one of the director's most underappreciated responsibilities is managing that internal fault line, ensuring that ERO's highly visible arrest operations do not undermine HSI's ability to cultivate the confidential informants and foreign partnerships on which its work depends. When political leadership prioritizes one mission at the expense of the other, the consequences ripple across the entire agency.

Another key decision that the administration will need to make, Sandweg said, is how much freedom the White House is willing to give the next director in executing its immigration policies. 

“Do they want someone who's going to weigh in heavily in terms of the types of operations the officers do on the streets where they target immigrants, how they arrest them? Or do they want someone who's not going to kind of try to drive those operational strategies, but instead is just going to make sure that the operational strategies that the White House or the DHS kind of craft are carried out?” Sandweg said. 

Strained relations with Congress

It has been more than 10 years since the Senate last confirmed an ICE director, when Sarah Saldaña was confirmed under the Obama administration in 2014. The Appointment Clause of the Constitution mandates that the heads of agencies such as ICE are required to be confirmed by the Senate. But in practice, recent administrations, both Democrats and Republicans, have relied on acting directors, allowing them to bypass the Senate confirmation process. 

According to another former senior ICE official, who is not authorized to speak publicly, the reasons are often prioritization and control. 

“There's only so, so many nominees that can get through, and if it's a tight Congress where it's going to be hard to get nominees through that, it can basically fall off the list of prioritization if there's general happiness with acting [directors],” the official said. 

The official added that some secretaries or administrations may prefer acting directors over political appointees because they believe the head of the department can exert more control over them. 

“Senate-confirmed directors have a little bit of independence, because the Senate has said ‘we trust you, we're empowering you to do this job,’” the official said. “In some cases, there may not be an obvious or a good candidate. Or there may be a sense that because the DHS mission ICE mission is so unique that it's better to have acting [directors] whom the agency employees know and trust.”

But serving as an acting director comes with legal limits. Under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, acting officials can typically serve and use the title “acting” for 210 days from the vacancy’s start. That time limit may shape how long Venturella can formally lead the agency, but it does little to lessen the demands of the job. As the public face of the agency and the leader of an agency with more than 22,000 employees, Venturella will not be shielded from testifying in Congress or answering to his own workforce.

He will also need to manage a deteriorating relationship with Congress, driven by a cascade of controversies that transformed ICE from a political asset into a liability. The deadly shootings in Minnesota, along with a legal fight that blocked lawmakers from conducting oversight visits at immigration detention centers, have galvanized Senate Democrats to block ICE's annual funding.

“Every day, a member of Congress might call you and say, ‘could you look into this case? Maybe consider releasing this person who's in custody? Why are you doing an enforcement operation in my district? Or why are you going after my constituents?’ And that stuff happens every day,” Sandweg said.

For White House Border czar Tom Homan and Secretary Mullin, keeping Venturella's arrival low-key may be a deliberate attempt to avoid drawing fresh congressional fire to an agency already under siege. After months of shutdown fights, bipartisan condemnation, and calls to abolish ICE entirely, the last thing the administration may want is another headline.

“It's going to be a different ICE. And I think it's gonna be interesting in the next few months to see how all this plays out, ” Sandweg said.