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‘ICE Barbie’ Kristi Noem Picks Her New Deporter-in-Chief

The agency’s new leadership further solidifies the Trump administration’s revamp of ICE, which it sees as crucial to carrying out its crackdown on illegal immigration.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced her picks for leadership of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Sunday, further solidifying the Trump administration’s revamp of an agency it sees as crucial to carrying out its crackdown on illegal immigration.

Noem named one outsider, Madison Sheahan, and a longtime agency employee, Todd Lyons, to two new senior roles in the agency.

Sheahan, the previous secretary of Louisiana’s Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, will now serve as the acting deputy director of the ICE. Lyons, a seasoned ICE employee who has assumed several roles in the agency’s enforcement and removal branch, will now serve as the ICE’s acting director.

“For the past four years, our brave men and women of ICE were barred from doing their jobs—ICE needs a culture of accountability that it has been starved of under the Biden Administration,” Noem said in a statement Sunday.

“With President Trump’s support, I am appointing new ICE leadership to deliver results that President Trump and the American people rightfully demand,” she continued. “Todd Lyons and Madison Sheahan are work horses, strong executors, and accountable leaders who will lead the men and women of ICE to achieve the American people’s mandate to target, arrest and deport illegal aliens.”

In an interview on CBS News’ Face the Nation Sunday, Noem additionally noted that Lyons and Sheahan “have done incredible work cleaning up our communities and making them safer” in the past and spotlighted Lyons’ “long history” with President Donald Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan.

“Adding more people to the team, with Todd and with Madison, is going to allow us to partner with local law enforcement officials to make sure that we truly are following through on enforcing the law, and if you break our law, then there’s going to be consequences,” Noem continued.

Prior to working in Louisiana’s Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, Sheahan worked alongside Noem in the South Dakota government when the Homeland Security Secretary was governor. She also worked for the state’s Republican Party.

Meanwhile, Lyons has had a long career at ICE, joining the agency as a deportation officer in 2007 and working his way up to the assistant director of field operations for its enforcement and removal branch in 2024. Prior to joining the agency over a decade age, Lyons served in the U.S. Air Force.

Lyons succeeds Caleb Vitello in this new role, who was demoted by Noem in February—just one month into his tenure. Vitello, another seasoned ICE official, was removed as acting director following frustration from the White House over sluggish deportation numbers in the month since Trump took office.

He has since been reassigned into a new role overseeing daily enforcement operations.

Trump has repeatedly voiced his desire to launch one of the biggest deportation efforts in the country’s history, and has green-lit a handful of new initiatives to see it through.