The White House has pulled the plug on its pick to run Immigration and Customs Enforcement, withdrawing Richard "Lance" Schroyer's nomination on Wednesday after it stalled for months in the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, according to CBS News and ABC News. The White House offered no public explanation for scrapping the pick.

Schroyer, a 29-year law enforcement veteran and former Oklahoma state trooper who also served in the Marine Corps, was nominated in June to become ICE's assistant secretary-level director while working as a senior adviser to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin. He had no prior experience leading a federal law enforcement agency, a gap critics on both sides flagged early in the process, per ABC's reporting.

A senator's blockade

The nomination's real trouble came from inside the GOP. Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky refused to let the committee advance Schroyer, demanding a full accounting of federal investigations into the fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens by ICE agents in Minneapolis in January. Time reports Paul's office insisted he had not taken a formal position against Schroyer personally — only that he would not move the nomination until DHS turned over records on the shootings.

Paul's office says the senator "has not expressed opposition to Schroyer," framing the holdup as a fight over information access rather than a rejection of the nominee.

It remains unclear whether DHS ever produced the documents Paul sought. Politico has reported that longstanding friction between Paul and Mullin — the two overlapped for years in the Senate before Mullin moved to DHS — may also have fed the standoff, though neither office has confirmed that account on the record.

The vacancy leaves ICE, which oversees a budget of roughly $75 billion and sits at the center of the administration's deportation push, still without a Senate-confirmed director — a gap that stretches back to 2017. David Venturella, a former private-prisons executive, has been running the agency in an acting capacity since Todd Lyons stepped down from the top job earlier this year.

The White House has not said when, or whether, it will name a replacement nominee. With the Senate committee now cleared of Schroyer's stalled paperwork, attention turns to whether the administration will try to install another Mullin ally or look outside DHS for a candidate who can win over holdouts like Paul. Neither the White House nor DHS had issued a public statement on next steps as of Thursday. A separate outlet's account of the committee standoff digs deeper into the Paul-Mullin history behind it.