Venturella has been leading the ICE division that oversees detention contracts.
FILE – Todd Lyons, acting director of the U.S. Immigration and Customs. Enforcement , speaks during a television interview the White House Nov. 3, 2025 in Washington.
David Venturella, a former executive at a private prison operator, will serve as the acting head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Trump administration says, after the agency’s current leader steps down at the end of the month. , who led the agency through much of the administration’s tumultuous crackdown on immigration. ICE did not immediately respond to an email seeking additional information Wednesday.
Venturella left the Geo Group in early 2023 and has been working at ICE leading the division that oversees detention contracts, members of Congress wrote in a public letter earlier this year. At the Geo Group, which houses around one-third of ICE detainees, Venturella served in a number of posts, including executive vice president overseeing corporate development, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
He also oversaw removal operations for ICE in 2011 and 2012 after working for federal contractors, including one that specializes in security clearances and background checks.
“Last year was the most successful period for new business wins in our company’s history,” Geo’s CEO George Zoley said during an earnings call last week. Geo owns and operates 23 ICE detention facilities, with about 26,000 available beds. Zoley also said that ICE’s air transportation subcontract had continued to steadily increase and that it secured a new contract last year for electronic monitoring.
To Silky Shah, executive director of the Detention Watch Network, the hire is a “classic example of the revolving door phenomena. ” In a statement, she expressed concern that “Venturella’s intimate knowledge of ICE will likely yield another spike of ICE detention facility openings. ” Venturella will lead ICE at a time when the public mood has soured on Trump’s immigration crackdown, which sent surges of federal immigration officers into American cities to round up immigrants.
Those raids sent tensions soaring and prompted clashes between protesters and law enforcement, leading toTrump returned to the White House on a promise of mass deportations, and ICE has been a central executor of that vision. Under Lyons’ leadership, the agency used aFederal officials announced Lyons’ departure last month from ICE, which had gotten $75 billion from Congress to fulfill Trump’s mass deportation campaign.
Venturella’s appointment comes as DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin settles into his role atop the Cabinet agency overseeing ICE. Mullin has promised to keep his department out of the headlines and has indicatedOne contentious issue confronting DHS now is a plan for converting warehouses into immigrant detention. Conceived while Kristi Noem led the department, the effort has encountered multiple lawsuits andand mean acquiring eight large-scale facilities, capable of housing 7,000 to 10,000 detainees each, and 16 smaller regional processing centers.
US colleges report 20% drop in foreign students over visa clampdownTrump’s proposed ‘Golden Dome’ estimated to cost $1.2 trillion, far more than he initially said Those, and other sites, were supposed to be running by the end of November. But after Noem’s departure, DHS paused theThis could be good news for Geo. The Florida-based company has about 6,000 idle beds at six company-owned facilities, Zoley said last week.
Zoley had offered a note of skepticism about the warehouse plan during an earlier earnings call in February, noting that renovating a warehouse is “more complicated than you may think. ” At that point, he said the company was “cautiously” looking at whether to bid to help operate some of them. Passengers on Frontier plane that killed man on DIA runway intend to sue, law firms announce Colorado Democrats cannot force employers to use someone's pronouns.
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