Todd Lyons, acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, seen here testifying in the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, DC, has resigned.

• Todd Lyons, the acting head of ICE, will leave his post at the agency.
• Lyons was appointed acting director of ICE in March 2025.
• Lyons’s departure comes after Gregory Bovino resigned from the US Border Patrol after outcry over violent raids in Minneapolis.

The acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Todd Lyons, will leave his post at the agency charged with enforcing US President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant crackdown in May, the Homeland Security Secretary announced on Thursday.

Todd Lyons “has been a great leader of ICE”, said Markwayne Mullin in a statement, adding that his last day would be 31 May and wishing him luck in his “next opportunity in the private sector”.

Lyons was appointed acting director of ICE by Trump in March 2025.

He was a “key player” in the US president’s anti-immigration drive, Mullin said.

Mullin, who was appointed just a few weeks ago following the dismissal of his predecessor, Kristi Noem, did not give a reason for Lyon’s departure or announce a replacement.

READ | US lawmakers hammer Homeland chief Kristi Noem over ‘lies and lawlessness’

The federal police have come under fire for carrying out brutal anti-immigrant raids, with two US citizen protesters shot and killed by federal agents in Minneapolis this year.

Lyons’s departure comes a month after Gregory Bovino, the face of Trump’s immigration raids, resigned from the US Border Patrol after outcry over violent raids in Minneapolis.

At a Department of Homeland Security oversight hearing in February, Lyons defended the law enforcement agency’s work.

“The president tasked us with mass deportation, and we are fulfilling that mandate,” he told Congress.

Campaigning against illegal immigration helped Trump get elected in 2024, but the killings of the two Americans, videos of masked agents snatching people off the streets, and reports of people being targeted on flimsy evidence, have contributed to a steep drop in his approval ratings.

Reuters reported that, according to rights groups, Trump’s immigration crackdown led by ICE, which is part of DHS, has violated free speech and due process rights.

ICE’s fatal ⁠shooting of two US citizens in Minnesota - Alex Pretti and Renee Good - in January sparked nationwide protests and human rights experts said the agency’s actions have created an unsafe environment, particularly for minorities.

Trump says the crackdown is necessary to improve domestic security and curb illegal immigration.

Trump fired Noem in early March and tapped Mullin as the new DHS chief.

The DHS has been shut down for over two months, with lawmakers in Congress unable to agree on legislation to fund the agency in the wake of Trump’s immigration crackdown.

Earlier on Thursday, prosecutors in Minnesota charged an ICE agent with assault for allegedly pointing his gun at people in a car along a highway in Minneapolis in February.

Prosecutors said those marked ‌the ⁠first charges against an ICE officer over actions related to the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota earlier this year.

The accused agent told state investigators he had “feared for his safety”.

Before being appointed acting chief of ICE in March 2025, Lyons was the executive associate director of the agency’s Enforcement and Removal Operations directorate.

In that role, he led efforts to arrest and remove migrants who came to ⁠the US illegally, according to his official biography.

Lyons held other roles at the Enforcement and Removal Operations directorate, including assistant director of field operations and deputy assistant director of western operations and the southwest border, among other positions.

He started with the directorate as an ⁠immigration enforcement agent in Dallas.