When Did Politico Become a Gossip Sheet for the D.C. Establishment?

A Politico hit piece last week on acting ICE Director Todd Lyons bears the salacious headline “‘Visibly upset and struggling’: Acting ICE head hospitalized twice over stress, officials say”. That story carries the same byline as an earlier article (which I eviscerated because I understand how government contracting works) on CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott. Respectfully, I’d question Lyons’ sense if he didn’t feel strain in his current, thankless job, but when exactly did Politico become a gossip sheet for the D.C. establishment? The outlet should realize it’s being used in a smarmy political effort by unknown individuals with their own hidden agendas, a maneuver as old as the Republic itself.

Todd Lyons

Lyons is about as close to an “ICE lifer” as anyone in the 23-year-old agency can be.

He began his public service career in 1993 with the U.S. Air Force, where he served in South Korea, Asia, and Europe.

He left the service in July 1999 and worked in law enforcement in Florida, only to be recalled to active duty in the wake of the September 11^th terrorist attacks to serve as “the antiterrorism/force protection liaison for Special Operations Command - Central” overseas.

In April 2007, he joined ICE as an Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) immigration and enforcement agent in Dallas, later becoming a supervisory detention and deportation officer for fugitive operations before ascending to the position of chief of staff for the Dallas ERO field office director (FOD) in August 2014.

He wasn’t in that spot long, because he was named assistant FOD for Dallas in April 2015, heading up the criminal alien program over a jurisdiction that spread from North Texas through Oklahoma.

Later, he became the FOD for ERO’s Boston Field Office (likely the second most taxing job in the agency), then assistant director of field operations for ERO, and deputy assistant director of western operations and the Southwest border.

When Trump returned, Lyons was tapped first to be the acting chief of ERO — the ICE directorate that arrests and detains aliens in the interior — and then in March 2025 to serve as acting director of the whole agency.

ICE Director

Short of “rodeo clown” or “suicide jockey”, few occupations come with more inherent difficulty and fewer upsides than helming America’s chief interior immigration-enforcement agency.

Want proof? The last Senate-confirmed ICE director was Sarah Saldaña, who served under President Obama and left when her boss did on January 20, 2017.

Since then, the agency has had a slew of acting chiefs, including luminaries such as current “Border Czar” Tom Homan and former Border Patrol chiefs Ron Vitiello and Mark Morgan.

During the Biden administration, Tae Johnson held the acting director’s role for so long the Government Accountability Office (GAO) sent a letter telling the White House in February 2023 that he was required to depart, and he was eventually replaced by Patrick Lechleitner, who held the post until the end of the last administration, that July.

That’s even though, as I have noted in the past, Biden promised on the 2020 campaign trail he would have a Senate-confirmed director running ICE in his “first 100 days”. Not that Biden didn’t try, though his efforts to nominate Ed Gonzalez, sheriff of Harris County, Texas, ran into roadblocks (twice).

Want a perpetual target on your back and a steady diet of scorn and vitriol? Do I have a job for you.

“Visibly Upset and Struggling”

Which brings me to the Politico “exclusive” on Lyons, which begins:

Acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Todd Lyons has been hospitalized at least twice for stress-related issues as he has carried out President Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration agenda — strain that has caused him to struggle to make key decisions for the agency, according to two current and two former administration officials.

I’ll leave it to other swamp denizens to guess who the unnamed “current and former administration officials” were who dumped on Lyons, but they may have been the same people who took swipes at Scott.

That’s because Anna Giaretelli, who covers homeland security at the Washington Examiner and is dialed in at the department, issued the following cryptic tweet not long after the Politico piece appeared:

In any event, the Politico article claims Lyons was hospitalized twice in recent months, once spending the night in a D.C. hospital in December three months after he was hospitalized “during an episode” in September.

As per the outlet:

During these episodes, the current and former officials said they saw Lyons break out into a full sweat, with his face turning deep red.

...

“He would be visibly upset and struggling to make the decisions that were needed to be made by the director,” said one of the former officials, referring to Lyons.

Much like the purported cost of improvements for Scott’s personal office in Politico’s January drive-by of the CBP commissioner (which ran less than $42,000), the target audience for this non-HIPAA-compliant gossip is apparently folks outside the Beltway, who may not appreciate the physical toll imposed in leading a federal agency.

More saliently, however, D.C. operators could tell you that if Lyons truly posed such a danger to the immigration-enforcement apparatus, the unnamed leakers would have peddled their tales to a higher-profile outlet like the Washington Post or the New York Times — not Politico.

That’s not a dig; reporters at big outlets win Pulitzers for “uncovering misconduct and security lapses” at federal law enforcement agencies, and their investigations often begin small and expand out from there. Journalists are eager consumers of real proof of physical disability that impairs the capacity of high-level officials.

The Response

The administration was quick to come to Lyons’ defense.

Shortly after the Politico article appeared, Abigail Jackson — special assistant to the president & White House deputy press secretary — tweeted the following from her personal X account:

Adding an official imprimatur to Jackson’s personal tweet, DHS then reposted it to the department’s official X account.

Lyons has also subsequently responded to Politico’s claims, telling Ali Bradley at NewsNation that “his hospitalizations were for military deployment VA issues” — an explanation that makes sense given the acting ICE director’s service record.

That Washington can be a pressure cooker for high-level officials handling hot-button issues is not news; neither is the fact that such positions can, and usually do, take a physical toll on the individuals holding them.

The real revelation in the Politico hatchet job on acting ICE Director Todd Lyons is that unnamed individuals close to the administration remain determined to undermine the professionals the president has assembled to implement his immigration agenda. But then, smarmy political maneuvering is as old as the Republic itself.