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.
I stopped by the city library for a candidate forum that was hosted by a local MAGA group, Toledoans for Trump, and was attended by about 50 Republicans who were mostly older and white. Several picked up yard signs that said YES to ICE and NO to Sanctuary Cities. Other voters and activists I spoke with said they have been thrilled by Trump’s border crackdown. And they wanted punishment for the immigrants Trump officials have accused of bilking welfare programs. But many told me they are more focused this year on economic issues such as gas prices and inflation. They’re against the expansion of data centers in the district, which they said would swallow up farmland and jack up their electric bills. They’re skeptical of the war in Iran and wary of what they view as undue Israeli influence over Trump.
Allison Molnar, who told me that she was a military spouse, carried home one of the pro-ICE signs and said she would plant it on her lawn. When I asked if she liked Sheahan—who didn’t show up to the forum—Molnar called her “an outsider.” She said she’ll vote for the former lawmaker Derek Merrin, who has run in this race once before.
Merrin kicked off his stump speech that day with illegal immigration—he wasn’t going to be outflanked—and he told the audience that negative media coverage of Trump was intended to demobilize GOP voters. “They want us to forget about the victories and successes that we are having,” he said. “Donald Trump has essentially stopped illegal immigration on the southern border. That’s a huge victory.”
For the past 43 years, the district has been represented by Marcy Kaptur, a Democrat, who first won her seat in 1982, the year that CD players and Diet Coke were introduced. Now 79, she is the longest-serving woman in congressional history. Kaptur has positioned herself as a moderate on immigration while urging more oversight of ICE tactics and spending.
Like Ohio itself, the district has trended more conservative in recent years, and Republicans have redrawn the district’s boundaries twice since 2022 to make it more difficult for Kaptur to win. The district now encompasses an area that voted for Trump in 2024 by nearly 11 percentage points—an extraordinary advantage to whoever can win the GOP primary tomorrow. Matt Gorman, a GOP political consultant, told me that Republicans have coveted the seat for a long time—“It’s a white whale,” he said—and that beating Kaptur is especially important for Republicans this year because doing so would help offset heavy losses the party is anticipating elsewhere.
[Read: The fight-club rule on gerrymandering]
“It is a seat we should win. It is a seat we need to win,” said Gorman, a former spokesperson for the National Republican Congressional Committee. “This seat is too important to screw up.”
Before Sheahan unexpectedly got into the race, two state representatives were already front-runners in the primary contest: Merrin, 40, whom Kaptur narrowly defeated in 2024, before the district was redrawn to make it even more conservative, and Josh Williams, 41, a state lawmaker and criminal-defense attorney who notes that he was the first Black Republican elected to the Ohio House of Representatives in 50 years. Both men align themselves with Trump and his agenda.
Sheahan has been racing to introduce herself to voters and generate name recognition. Her ads tout her as a “tough team player” who attended Ohio State University, where she was a member of the women’s rowing team, and are loaded with references to Trump. One ad claims, falsely, that ICE deported 2.5 million immigrants during her tenure (government statistics show about 400,000 ICE deportations last year). “In less than one year at ICE, I’ve stopped more illegal immigration than Marcy Kaptur has in her 43 years in Washington,” Sheahan says.
[Read: Kristi Noem is gone. Now mass deportations can really begin.]
Sheahan has secured the endorsement of Urban Meyer, the former Ohio State football coach and broadcaster; the MAGA rocker Ted Nugent; and Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry. Notably, she has not received a Trump endorsement.
She appears to have struggled to gain traction. A poll of 600 likely GOP primary voters conducted in mid-April put Sheahan in third place, with 10 percent of support. Merrin, the former lawmaker who previously challenged Kaptur, led with 33 percent support, and the state lawmaker Williams was at 14 percent. But 40 percent of respondents said they hadn’t made up their mind. The pollster, J.L. Partners, noted that voter preference is driven by name identification more than any issue, which benefits Merrin. The survey found that Sheahan was effectively tied with Merrin among respondents who knew who she was, and the pollster noted that a Trump endorsement of any candidate would be powerful enough to “change the entire race.”
But GOP consultants I spoke with told me that whatever hopes Sheahan had of getting a late Trump endorsement were probably dashed on April 23, when The Daily Mail published an article headlined “Lesbian Sex Secrets of Kristi Noem’s ICE leader” that describes Sheahan’s alleged relationship with a younger colleague on the 2020 Trump campaign whom she briefly supervised. (Sheahan’s political adviser denied that she’d ever been in a relationship with a subordinate, and said the behavior depicted in the story was not illegal or outside the bounds of many relationships among young people.)
During my conversations with Republican voters and activists, I was struck by the extent to which they characterized Sheahan as a dilettante and a carpetbagger, even though she grew up on a local farm. A few weeks after Sheahan got in the race, a Williams supporter named Chris Enoch published a stinging editorial in the local Sandusky Register saying that he was “suspicious of Ohio ex-pats charging back in to run for office.”
“A community leader must be of, by, and for the community,” Enoch wrote. “They must know the community because they have lived it, worked in it, and put in the time to understand it fully.” That view of Sheahan was shared by many of the roughly two dozen Republican voters and party activists I spoke with in this district. Not one said they planned to support her in the primary. During my visit two weeks ago, Sheahan didn’t have any public events or speeches scheduled.
Sheahan and her staff did not respond to my calls and text messages. GOP activists in the district I met said they’ve been kept at a distance too. “Not to be rude, but I have zero perception of her,” Ron Johns, one of the founders of Toledoans for Trump, which has endorsed Merrin, told me. “I’ve never even considered her in the race. If she wants to run for something like county commissioner, we could use more candidates,” he said, “but I just don’t think this one is going to be her race.”
Wade Kapszukiewicz, the Democratic mayor of Toledo, told me that regardless of the GOP-primary outcome, Kaptur will face the toughest race of her career this fall. Kapszukiewicz said she is a “tenacious fighter” who has deep roots in a district where authenticity matters and voters “despise phonies.”
“The math looks overwhelming, but she is in touch with the values that matter in this part of the country,” Kapszukiewicz said. “Her real opponents are the mapmakers who redrew the district.” Kaptur has raised more than $3 million to defend against whoever emerges from the GOP primary. As in other recent cycles, to win, she’ll need Republicans to split their tickets and vote for her.
In one middle-class neighborhood of Toledo, I met Steve Hamilton, a retired engineer who told me that he plans to back Kaptur again, even though he’s voted for Trump the past three times. Hamilton has met Kaptur and likes her personally. “She doesn’t always vote the way I’d like, but she’s a good lady,” he told me. Hamilton said he’s worried about the direction of the economy and the country’s ever-increasing national debt. As for immigration, he favors “getting the bad guys out” but said he wouldn’t want to see Minneapolis-style chaos in his hometown.
I met him while shadowing Williams as he knocked on doors of one-story ranch houses and urged Republican voters to turn out for the primary. Williams told me that “affordability” is the No. 1 issue on voters’ minds. “We have the war going on with Iran, and the increase that we see at the gas pumps. We also have an explosion of property taxes.” Immigration, Williams said, “is not that huge of an issue here in northwest Ohio,” but like other GOP candidates, he opposes sanctuary policies and supports ICE.
[Read: Conservative women find a new way to talk about ICE]
Democratic strategists I spoke with said that if Sheahan wins the primary, they would not try to cast her work at ICE as a moral outrage. Rather, they think she’s most vulnerable to allegations of waste, incompetence, and corruption under Noem’s leadership. It was Sheahan who led the effort at ICE last year to purchase a fleet of new “wrapped” vehicles emblazoned with the agency’s logo. Rank-and-file ICE officers, who generally prefer to keep a low profile and use unmarked cars, have eschewed the vehicles, and the Washington Examiner reported that many are gathering dust in ICE garages.
In the campaign events I attended, Merrin and Williams did not mention Sheahan. Their lack of attention to her candidacy may be the clearest sign that they do not view her as much of a threat. Gorman, the GOP consultant, told me that at some point, Kaptur will lose or retire. “And,” he said, “the Republican to finally be there when the music stops for Marcy is going to have a very long congressional career.”
Marie-Rose Sheinerman contributed to this report.
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