ICE needs real oversight — demand Senate confirmation now

President Trump has announced that political appointee and adviser David Venturella will serve as the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement once career official Todd Lyons retires this month. This is a very troubling move for an agency that has not had a Senate-confirmed leader in nearly a decade and is now absorbing billions of dollars in new funding through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, with billions more potentially on the way through the reconciliation bill pending in the Senate.

Venturella was a senior executive for more than a decade in the GEO Group, the detention conglomerate currently housing 86 percent of detainees in ICE custody. Upon his arrival as a political appointee last year, Venturella oversaw Homeland Security contracts for immigration detention centers after receiving a federal ethics waiver related to his obvious conflict of interest — overseeing contracts overwhelmingly given to his former employer. Furthermore, the big beautiful bill added $45 billion for immigration detention centers through 2029. The GEO Group stands to receive a significant share of those funds.   

When he was a senior vice president of GEO Group, Venturella held more than 180,000 shares of GEO Group stock, currently valued at $4........

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