ICE Business

Last year’s temporary detention camps are becoming permanent human confinement infrastructure.

Amid a reshuffling of the administration’s internal security services, a longtime private prison executive has been named head of ICE.

On Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security named David Venturella acting director of ICE, effective June 1. He spent eleven years at GEO Group, the private prison giant, most recently as senior vice president. He rejoined ICE in February 2025 — overseeing the very contracts between ICE and his former employer. GEO Group holds over a billion dollars in ICE contracts.

He replaces Todd Lyons, who Donald Trump appeared to think was not aggressive enough. Trump wanted three thousand arrests a day, Lyons delivered around twelve hundred. In January, federal agents in Minneapolis killed two American citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Lyons refused to apologize. Eighteen people have died in ICE custody in the first four months of this year, on top of thirty-one last year, which was a two-decade high.

DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, who replaced Kristi Noem on March 5 in the aftermath of Minneapolis and other public debacles, says he wants ICE to be “more transport than front line.” A quieter, more ruthless approach. The work shifts from theater to logistics. ICE is converting twenty-four warehouses across the country into detention sites — including a former Amazon-style logistics hub near Hagerstown, Maryland, bought for a hundred and two million dollars to hold fifteen hundred people. The seventy-five billion Congress appropriated will get spent. Forty-five billion of it on new detention space.

Last year’s temporary detention camps are becoming permanent human confinement infrastructure.