The 29-year-old woman Kristi Noem handpicked to oversee ICE’s billion-dollar budget just lost her nomination bid in an Ohio congressional primary.
Madison Sheahan, a former ICE deputy director, was in third place Wednesday when the Associated Press called the state’s 9th district Republican primary for former state Representative Derek Merrin.
Republican operatives consider Ohio’s 9th district one of the party’s best chances to flip a House seat, The Washington Post reported. The seat is currently held by Representative Marcy Kaptur, who has held onto it for 22 terms.
Sheahan had left her role at ICE to pursue her congressional campaign, shortly before her apparent mentor Noem was unceremoniously fired.
In her role, Sheahan reportedly wasted millions of taxpayer dollars on 2,500 custom-wrapped vehicles that read “ICE.” The gaudy cars feature massive ICE logos, red stripes, and a golden decal of President Donald Trump’s name on the back window. The vehicles first appeared in a DHS video intended to make ICE look cool. But the fleet of ostentatious cars proved useless to the masked militia, which prefers to disappear people using unmarked vehicles.
On the campaign trail, Sheahan touted her work with ICE, but political analysts found that immigration did not play as large a role in the primaries as economic issues such as the job market and tariffs, the Post reported.
Her candidacy was considered an early bellwether for how voters felt about Trump’s handling of immigration policy, and her resounding failure could signal disaster for other candidates too closely tied to the president’s unpopular policy initiatives.