David Venturella is expected to be the next acting director of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson confirmed to NPR on Tuesday.
Venturella most recently worked for the department overseeing contracts between ICE and various detention facilities. He previously worked for ICE during the Obama and George W. Bush administrations.
He left the agency in 2012 to work for Geo Group, a private prison company that contracts with the federal government, including for immigration detention. Venturella was at Geo Group for a little over a decade.
The New York Times first reported news of his appointment.
The Trump administration has rapidly scaled up its detention capacity and policies in the past year, even as deaths in detention hit their highest total since DHS was founded, following a sharp increase in the number of detainees.
Venturella will take the position effective June 1 following the resignation of current acting Director Todd Lyons. The selection comes as new leaders at DHS, including Secretary Markwayne Mullin, want to shift away from controversial and headline-grabbing immigration enforcement surges in cities. But the department plans to continue to build up its detention and deportation capacity.
Last year, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee wrote to White House border czar Tom Homan, raising concern that Venturella’s return to ICE to oversee contracts that would go to companies like Geo Group, his previous employer, presented a conflict of interest. They also complained about Homan himself coming to the White House after being a paid consultant to Geo Group.
Compared to the start of President Trump’s second term, Venturella takes over an agency with a larger workforce, more financial resources, and also a continued funding lapse.
Under Lyon’s tenure, the agency took the lead in Trump’s mass deportation agenda, rapidly scaling up arrests across the country. Lyons faced intense pressure to carry out the administration’s deportation goals, which included 3,000 arrests a day. The agency is currently arresting about 1,200 people a day, Mullin recently said. It’s also deported more than 570,000 people – though that’s well short of Trump’s goal of a million deportations a year.
Lyons also oversaw a hiring surge that brought on 12,000 new employees. The agency is also gearing up to quickly spend what remains of the $75 billion congressional Republicans funded last summer – about half of which is dedicated for an expansion of detention space.
But ICE and Border Patrol were excluded from regular appropriations, even as Congress finally ended the longest agency shutdown in U.S. history and agreed to fund the rest of DHS. Republicans are separately looking at a partisan process known as reconciliation to fund all of DHS, including ICE, for the remainder of Trump’s time in office without requiring any Democratic support.
