Todd Lyons, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, will leave the agency at the end of May after months of mounting pressure and at least two stress-related hospitalizations, newly confirmed Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told the Daily Mail.
Mullin said May 31 will be Lyons' last official day. CBS News first reported Thursday, citing two U.S. officials familiar with the plan, that Lyons had told colleagues he intended to depart in June. The two officials said Lyons planned to step down to spend more time with his family, including his sons, in Massachusetts.
The departure closes a turbulent chapter for the man who led the front-line agency of President Trump's immigration enforcement agenda, and raises immediate questions about who will carry that mission forward at a moment when congressional Democrats are blocking full DHS funding and illegal immigration remains a defining issue for the administration.
Mullin, who was confirmed by the Senate last month, praised Lyons in a statement to the Daily Mail:
"Director Lyons has been a great leader of ICE and key player in helping the Trump administration remove murderers, rapists, pedophiles, terrorists, and gang members from American communities. He jumpstarted an agency that had not been allowed to do its job for four years. Thanks to his leadership, American communities are safer."
Mullin wished Lyons well in the private sector. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller offered a separate statement calling Lyons a "phenomenal patriot and dedicated leader who has been at the center of President Trump's historic efforts to secure our homeland and reverse the Democrats' sinister border invasion."
Those are not the words of officials pushing a man out the door. They read like a farewell for someone who gave everything he had, and whose body told him to stop.
Politico previously reported that Lyons was hospitalized at least twice for stress. Three officials told Politico that in September, Lyons was hospitalized for at least one night. In December, his security detail drove him to a hospital in Washington, D.C., where one former and two current officials said he was admitted overnight.
A separate incident over the summer in Los Angeles painted an even more alarming picture. During a ride-along, Lyons became distressed after ICE agents could not locate a migrant on their target list. A bodyguard retrieved a portable defibrillator from a nearby government office in case Lyons needed medical intervention.
Lyons himself pushed back on the narrative that White House pressure caused his health problems. He said: "Any stress is in no way related to pressure from the White House, and nothing will get in the way of me doing my job."
In the same statement, he framed his work in terms of duty. Lyons said: "Since the beginning of this administration, I have worked night and day, all day, every day to undo the harms Joe Biden has caused to the American people." He added a direct warning to the administration's critics:
"Let me send a message to anyone who thinks they can intimidate us: You will fail."
That defiance is worth noting. Lyons did not leave quietly or apologetically. He left on his feet, after nearly two decades in federal law enforcement, insisting that the mission mattered more than the toll it took on him personally. The White House has consistently stood by its immigration enforcement leadership even as critics have tried to paint the crackdown as excessive.
Lyons first joined ICE in 2007 as an agent in Dallas. He was also an Air Force veteran. Over the years, he rose to become field office director of the agency's Boston region, which covers all of New England, and later served as assistant director for field operations of ICE's Enforcement and Removal Operations.
His tenure as acting director was marked by aggressive action. In May 2025, Lyons signed a memo authorizing ICE agents to forcibly enter homes without a judicial warrant during certain operations, a move that drew fierce opposition from immigration advocates and Democratic lawmakers but reflected the administration's position that the crackdown was necessary to improve domestic security and curb illegal immigration.
He also testified before Congress earlier this year, facing questions from lawmakers who have grown increasingly hostile to the administration's enforcement posture. Democrats in Congress have refused to fully fund DHS until the Trump administration agrees to make certain reforms to its immigration crackdown.
That funding standoff is the backdrop against which Lyons' departure will be felt most sharply. Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act provided $75 million for Lyons' effort to recruit and hire thousands of additional deportation agents. Whether that hiring push continues at the same pace without him remains an open question.
Lyons' time at the top was not without internal conflict. He reportedly disagreed with former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem's efforts to elevate Gregory Bovino, a Border Patrol official, and task him with roundups in major cities. Bovino was eventually relieved from his position, a resolution that suggests Lyons' objections carried weight inside the department.
Politico also cited sources describing tense dynamics with the White House. Some sources said Miller yelled at Lyons during morning phone calls with administration officials. Others denied that characterization. One source, referring to Miller, said he was just "passionate." A former official told Politico that Lyons "would be visibly upset and struggling to make the decisions that were needed to be made by the director."
Those accounts are disputed, and Lyons himself rejected the idea that White House pressure drove his health problems. But the picture that emerges is one of an acting director caught between enormous operational demands, political headwinds from Congress, and an administration that expected results at a pace the agency had never attempted before. The broader political pressures facing Republicans in Washington only added to the weight on enforcement leaders like Lyons.
Lyons also defended his agents following the deaths of U.S. citizens Alex Pretti and Renee Good, incidents that drew scrutiny to ICE operations. The exact circumstances of those deaths are not detailed in available reporting, but Lyons' willingness to stand behind his officers in the face of public criticism distinguished him from bureaucratic leaders who tend to distance themselves from controversy at the first sign of political heat.
That instinct, to protect the people doing the work rather than to manage headlines, is precisely what rank-and-file agents need from leadership. It is also the kind of posture that makes an acting director a target for the institutional left, which has spent years trying to delegitimize ICE as an agency. Amid ongoing White House-driven enforcement battles, the next ICE leader will face the same crossfire.
The administration has not publicly named a successor. With Mullin newly installed at DHS and the immigration enforcement apparatus under constant legal and legislative challenge, the transition will test whether the gains Lyons oversaw, expanded operations, the warrantless-entry memo, the hiring push funded by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, survive his departure or stall in the bureaucratic churn that follows any leadership change.
Democrats will no doubt treat Lyons' exit as vindication, proof, in their telling, that the enforcement push was unsustainable or cruel. That framing ignores what actually happened. A career law enforcement officer ran himself into the ground trying to do a job that the previous administration refused to let anyone do for four years. He was hospitalized. He kept working. He left on his own terms, with praise from his superiors and a record of action that his critics never wanted him to build.
Security challenges around the nation's capital and across the country are not going away. The question now is whether the next person in that chair will have the same willingness to absorb the pressure, or whether the permanent bureaucracy and its allies in Congress will succeed in grinding the mission to a halt.
Todd Lyons didn't fail. The job nearly broke him because he actually tried to do it.