Nick Miroff writes:

In mid-January, while Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and agents were battling protesters on the icy streets of Minneapolis, ICE Deputy Director Madison Sheahan abruptly quit. This was a week after an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good; another protester, Alex Pretti, was slain nine days later. Sheahan, then 28, had been on the job for less than a year, but she did not resign in protest. She left to run for Congress in Ohio.

Sheahan’s campaign quickly raised hundreds of thousands of dollars, and released ads that leaned hard into her lead role in President Trump’s mass-deportation campaign. Sheahan came to ICE with no background in immigration, but she was close to Kristi Noem, Trump’s first Homeland Security secretary this term. Some veteran officials did not take kindly to being ordered around by an inexperienced 20-something who had previously worked at the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries (some jokingly referred to her as “fish cop”). Noem’s public-affairs team often appeared intent to counter those concerns by circulating photos of Sheahan wearing body armor and an ICE badge, and flying in helicopters. Those images now feature prominently in Sheahan’s political ads and promotional videos.

I was curious to see how Sheahan’s mass-deportation message was playing with Republican primary voters, especially as ICE’s reputation has deteriorated, so I traveled late last month to Ohio’s Ninth Congressional District, which includes Toledo and rural areas across the state’s northwest corner. Ohio was key to the MAGA movement’s conquest of working-class white voters in the Rust Belt who were disaffected by globalization and booming immigration. It is the state where Trump falsely claimed in 2024 that Haitian immigrants in the city of Springfield were eating cats and dogs. Trump has carried Ohio in the past three presidential elections and won this district in 2024. But without his name on the ballot this year, Sheahan’s candidacy will test how much the mass-deportation message can still drive GOP voters to the polls. [Continue reading…]