What are an ICE Deportation Officer's duties when they are on EOD status?

1. Daily enforcement duties: locating, arresting, and executing removal orders

An on-duty Deportation Officer is charged with locating individuals subject to civil immigration removal or criminal arrest, serving warrants, effectuating arrests, and executing final orders of removal—tasks described as identifying, locating and arresting undocumented aliens and ensuring their physical removal from the U.S. ^{[1] [2]}.

2. Custody, transport and deportation logistics

Once in custody, officers document detainees by taking fingerprints and photographs, prepare travel and transfer paperwork, escort and transport both criminal and non-criminal migrants under supervisory guidance, and carry out the logistical steps necessary to deport or transfer individuals to other jurisdictions or countries ^{[2] [5]}.

3. Investigative and case-preparation responsibilities

Deportation Officers conduct routine interviews, source-document inspections and data analysis to build removal cases, assist in determining legal sufficiency for criminal referrals, and may prepare subpoenas or present cases for prosecution when matters meet U.S. Attorney guidelines, especially on complex or sensitive matters ^{[2] [3] [6]}.

4. Custodial care and standards while detainees are in ICE custody

On-duty officers are responsible for ensuring the safe, secure and humane treatment of detainees while in ICE custody, applying detention standards and handling detainee needs during custody and movement—responsibilities explicitly noted in supervisory and operational job descriptions ^{[6] [7]}.

5. Training, equipment and use-of-force framework

An officer on EOD status must satisfy prescribed training and fitness requirements—completion of ERO basic law enforcement training or equivalent academies, periodic physical fitness standards, and carrying firearms as required—while operating under agency use-of-force policies that allow deadly force “when necessary,” per ICE job announcements ^{[3] [2] [8]}.

6. Interagency coordination and specialty tasking

Deportation Officers routinely partner with other federal, state and local law enforcement and may be assigned to task forces (for example, INTERPOL or multiagency task forces), fugitive operations teams, or task-specific deployments such as city task forces or National Fugitive Operation Teams that focus on public-safety threats, gang members, or re-entrants ^{[4] [9] [3]}.

7. Career, administrative and hiring context that shapes on-duty expectations

The scope of on-duty duties is framed by hiring and human-resources rules—promotion ladders, background and polygraph checks, and deadlines for reemployed annuitants to enter on duty—that determine who performs these front-line duties and under what terms, while agency recruitment materials emphasize mission readiness and operational scale ^{[3] [2] [4]}.

8. Alternative perspectives and potential agendas in reporting and recruitment

Official descriptions stress public-safety priorities and humane custody standards, but critics point to recruitment messaging and on-the-ground realities—reporting from Slate argues recruitment events and promises sanitize or conceal daily practices and the political aims of large-scale enforcement—an alternative framing that highlights how recruitment practices and public messaging can shape perceptions of what “on-duty” work actually entails ^{[4] [10]}.

9. Limits of available reporting

Public job notices and agency FAQs document core operational duties, training and policy language, but available sources here do not provide granular, independent field audits of daily practice, variation across field offices, or first-hand metrics on how often particular duties (for example, use of force, family separations, or deportation escorts) occur in different jurisdictions; that empirical detail is absent from the supplied materials ^{[2] [3] [1]}.