Ex-ICE Deputy Loses House GOP Primary in Ohio
Madison Sheahan failed to impress GOP voters with her banter about mass deportations and working for Kristi Noem.
WASHINGTON — The woman who ran the machinery of America’s mass deportation campaign couldn’t win a Republican primary in Northwest Ohio.
Madison Sheahan — who resigned as deputy director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in January to run for Congress — lost Tuesday’s GOP primary in Ohio’s 9th Congressional District to Derek Merrin, the former state legislator who will now face Rep. Marcy Kaptur, D-Ohio, in one of the most closely watched House races of the 2026 cycle.
The race was called quickly. There was no recount drama. Sheahan never broke out.
In a crowded field that also included state Rep. Josh Williams, Air Force veteran Alea Nadeem, and health-care executive Anthony Campbell, Merrin — who lost to Kaptur by fewer than 2,400 votes in 2024 — won on the strength of name recognition, existing campaign infrastructure, and something Sheahan couldn’t manufacture: a record that Ohio Republicans didn’t have to defend.
NO PRIOR LAW ENFORCEMENT EXPERIENCE
Sheahan’s record, by contrast, was the whole story.
Appointed by DHS Secretary Kristi Noem in March 2025, Sheahan became the number-two official at ICE at age 28 with no prior law enforcement experience — a credential gap that watchdogs flagged from day one and that her primary opponents made central to their attacks. She arrived at the agency as a political loyalist, having cut her teeth as Noem’s political director and as executive director of the South Dakota Republican Party before a brief stint as Louisiana’s secretary of wildlife and fisheries, a role critics derided as “fish cop” but which she parlayed into an argument about executive management.
‘IN JUST ONE YEAR WE’VE MADE HISTORY’
At ICE, she became a public face of the Trump administration’s mass deportation push, touting an agency that she said recruited roughly 12,000 new officers and removed more than 2.5 million people in roughly a year.
What she did not tout on the campaign trail — but what her opponents and opposition researchers made sure voters knew — was the human cost running alongside those numbers. ICE under her watch experienced what reporting characterized as its deadliest year in custody, with dozens of deaths inside detention facilities. Most explosive were the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by immigration officers during enforcement operations in Minneapolis, events that triggered national protests and forced uncomfortable questions about who was making decisions at the top of the agency.
For migrant communities, those weren’t abstract controversies. They were funerals.
REPUBLICANS PRIVATELY RELIEVED
Party insiders were privately relieved by Tuesday’s result, fearing that nominating Sheahan would hand Kaptur — the longest-serving woman in Congress — a general-election weapon too easy to use. But their relief is cold comfort for the families separated, detained, and deported under an operation Sheahan helped run and openly celebrated.
Sheahan campaigned hard on the ICE brand — helicopters, tactical gear, the language of “criminal illegals” — and it wasn’t enough. She never secured an endorsement from former President Trump. Polling in April showed Merrin leading with roughly a third of the vote, while Sheahan was stuck in the mid-teens with a large undecided bloc that ultimately did not break her way.
THE APPARATUS IS STILL RUNNING
In her launch video, which is not worth sharing here beyond her tone deaf declaration that “in just one year we’ve made history” at ICE. Northwest Ohio Republicans, it turns out, weren’t buying what that history cost.
Merrin now faces Kaptur in a district redrawn to lean Republican — a rematch Republicans believe they can win. Whether Sheahan’s style of politics is done in this race is another question. The apparatus she helped build at ICE is still running.
Thanks for reminding us of who she is.