Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem named two new leaders at the government’s deportation agency on Sunday as she looks for ways to get deportation numbers up to where President Trump wants them.
Ms. Noem tapped Todd Lyons to be acting head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Madison D. Sheahan as deputy director.
Mr. Lyons has been a senior official in ICE’s deportation division for years, while Ms. Sheahan is a former aide to Ms. Noem when she was governor of South Dakota. Ms. Sheahan is currently secretary of Louisiana’s Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.
“ICE needs a culture of accountability that it has been starved of under the Biden administration,” Ms. Noem said in making the picks.
She called the two new picks “work horses, strong executors and accountable leaders.”
ICE handles interior immigration enforcement and manages the country’s deportations. It also has a legal division that prosecutes civil immigration offenses in the immigration courts, and it runs a detective division, Homeland Security Investigations, that pursues everything from smuggling to criminal gangs to online sex predators.
Mr. Trump has made swift work of getting the southern border in order, but his promises of mass deportations have been tougher to achieve, with deportation numbers actually down compared to the Biden administration.
That’s largely because there are so many fewer border crossers, some of whom did go through a formal ICE deportation.
Still, the slower pace has irked Mr. Trump and led to the sidelining of Caleb Vitello, whom Mr. Trump had tapped as acting director from his first day in office.
ICE has not had a confirmed director since the Obama administration. Mr. Trump’s picks in his first term and President Joseph R. Biden’s nominee during his tenure failed to make it through Senate confirmation.
