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The head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Tae Johnson, is leaving the agency, making him the second senior immigration official to announce retirement plans in the past week.
An ICE spokesperson said that Johnson, who has led the agency since 2021, will step down at the end of the month.
“I am grateful to Tae Johnson for his service to ICE, the Department, and the nation,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement Monday. He said Johnson has “overseen some of the nation’s most critical investigations,” including combatting counterfeit Covid vaccines and helping to “curtail the flow of fentanyl smuggled into the United States from Mexico.”
Johnson’s retirement announcement comes less than a week after U.S. Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz said he would be stepping down after more than three decades with the agency.
Johnson has been at ICE and its predecessor agency, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, for a total of 31 years. In his final months, he helped oversee the wind down of the Trump-era border policy known as Title 42 that ended last month.
ICE has not had a permanent director since 2017. The agency operated with five acting directors under the Trump administration. President Joe Biden’s nominee to be ICE director — Ed Gonzalez, the sheriff of Harris County, Texas — withdrew his name from consideration in 2022 after more than a year without a Senate confirmation vote.
ICE has about 20,000 employees and an annual budget of $4 billion.
Julia Ainsley contributed.
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