Todd Lyons, who stepped down in May as acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has taken a position at a defense contractor whose parent company counts the nation’s largest private prison operator among its clients.
Navigators Security and Defense announced that Lyons is the firm’s new senior vice president for U.S. homeland security and international affairs. The company told NPR that it does not engage in lobbying activities and that Lyons is barred under federal law from interacting with the Department of Homeland Security for one year. Lyons did not respond to multiple requests for comment, NPR reported.
“Lyons brings more than three decades of law enforcement leadership and military expertise in support of Navigators Security and Defense clientele,” the company said in a statement.
The firm is a subsidiary of Navigators Global, a Washington lobbying practice whose client roster includes General Motors, the New York Jets, and GEO Group — a private prison contractor that runs immigration detention centers across the country, including Delaney Hall Detention Center in Newark, New Jersey. Navigators Global has also represented NPR and the NPR Network to Congress since 2011.
Lyons served as ICE’s acting director from March 2025 to May 2026, a 14-month tenure that coincided with some of the Trump administration’s most aggressive immigration enforcement actions. He oversaw large-scale, made-for-television operations in Chicago and Minneapolis. According to NPR, the White House imposed a 3,000-person daily arrest quota, which ICE agents were never able to meet despite tactics that included arresting immigrants inside courthouses.
Lyons was replaced last month by David Venturella, a former GEO Group executive who served as the company’s senior vice president of client relations and, more recently, as a paid consultant.
GEO Group has seen its business surge amid close ties to the administration. In 2025, the company reported $254 million in income, a 700% increase from the prior year. In a statement celebrating first-quarter 2026 results, Chairman George Zoley called 2025 “the most successful period for new business wins in our Company’s history.”