The Department of Homeland Security said Tuesday evening that David Venturella has been chosen to lead Immigration and Customs Enforcement, putting a former executive tied to the agency’s hard-line past back at the center of President Donald Trump’s deportation drive. Venturella is set to replace Todd Lyons, whose departure was announced in April.
Venturella once ran ICE’s Secure Communities program, the system that shared digital fingerprints from people booked into jail with federal authorities to identify those in the country without authorization. He later served as a senior vice president of client relations at GEO Group until 2023, and public records show the private prison company holds more than $1 billion in contracts with ICE. After leaving GEO, he continued consulting for the company on new and existing contracts.
The appointment lands at a moment when ICE has been under intense pressure from the White House and from the public. Trump campaigned for his second term by promising mass deportations, and after he retook office the agency was thrust into the national spotlight during immigration crackdowns in Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Chicago and other cities. In Minneapolis, federal officers fatally shot two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, deepening the backlash over the tactics used by masked agents and federal teams sent into Democratic-run cities.
The move also revives a program that has long carried political baggage. President Barack Obama ended Secure Communities in 2014 after then-DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson said in a memo that the program alienated immigrant communities from local law enforcement. Trump signed an executive order in 2017 to bring it back. In April, two DHS officials told News that ICE field offices had been instructed that officers should no longer enter homes without judicial warrants, a change from past practice that was later reflected in a 2025 internal ICE document shared by whistleblowers with Sen. Richard Blumenthal.
Venturella’s selection immediately drew criticism from Democrats. U.S. Rep. Delia Ramirez objected Tuesday night, saying, “Let’s be clear: his appointment is to ensure Trump’s corporate bosses continue profiting from our communities’ pain.” The criticism goes to the center of the new ICE choice: a veteran manager returning from a contractor with deep agency ties, at a time when enforcement, detention and home-entry rules are under renewed scrutiny.
The agency has not had a Senate-confirmed director since Sarah Saldaña was confirmed in 2014 and left in 2017, and Lyons had been overseeing ICE during the latest crackdowns and the outrage that followed the fatal Minneapolis shootings. With Venturella now picked to lead the agency, the next test is whether the administration pushes his appointment through quickly or leaves ICE in the same acting-state limbo that has defined it for more than a decade.
