What specific roles and responsibilities did the ICE executive associate director for Enforcement and Removal Operations hold under Obama?

1. The formal mandate: run ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations

As EAD of ERO, the officeholder was responsible for leading the directorate whose mission is “investigating, apprehending and removing criminal aliens and immigration violators,” and for dismantling criminal networks that exploit the immigration system — a description provided in ICE’s own announcement about Homan’s award ^[1]. Reporting at the time characterized ERO as the branch that tracks down people with outstanding deportation orders and carries out removals, making ERO the operational arm of ICE enforcement ^{[3] [4]}.

2. Day-to-day functions: directing operations, strategy and field units

The position required developing enforcement strategies, methods and tools to support ERO operations and coordinating those strategies with field offices, task forces and partner law enforcement, responsibilities Homan reportedly helped shape while serving as assistant director and then EAD ^{[5] [2]}. ICE’s public materials and contemporaneous reporting indicate the EAD directed a workforce of thousands of officers and agents and oversaw the execution of arrests, deportation operations and detention strategies nationwide ^{[1] [6]}.

3. Management responsibilities: personnel, budgets and performance metrics

Homan, as EAD, managed an operating budget of more than $3 billion and a workforce of roughly 8,000 personnel (about 6,000 law-enforcement officers), according to ICE’s release when he received the 2015 Presidential Rank Award ^[1]. ICE credited ERO leadership under Homan with achieving high percentages of removals that met stated enforcement priorities and with overseeing large numbers of deportations during that period ^{[1] [7]}.

4. Enforcement priorities and outcomes under Obama-era ERO leadership

Contemporaneous reporting and official statements link ERO under Homan to a period of historically high removals — reporting that the Obama-era agency carried out record deportations and that ERO removed hundreds of thousands, often emphasizing the removal of convicted criminals — claims repeated in multiple sources ^{[7] [1] [6]}. ICE materials asserted that a majority of removals under Homan were of individuals with criminal convictions, and the agency touted meeting internal enforcement priorities ^[1].

5. Limits of the role and common mischaracterizations

Although the EAD for ERO was described as the “top enforcement job” inside ICE, that post is not the overall agency director; Homan did not lead ICE as a whole under Obama, a distinction emphasized in fact checks that push back on phrasing that calls him “ICE chief” during that administration ^{[2] [4]}. Sources also note he rose through assistant and deputy roles before becoming EAD in 2013, rather than being appointed head of the entire agency ^[2].

6. Political and contextual fallout: awards, praise and controversy

The Obama administration recognized Homan with a 2015 Presidential Rank Award for Distinguished Service while he served as EAD of ERO, a citation that highlighted ERO performance metrics; at the same time his later role in the Trump administration’s enforcement policies and association with family separations re‑framed how critics and supporters read his Obama-era record, an interpretive divide visible across news outlets ^{[1] [8] [7]}.

7. What sources do not settle

Public materials and reporting document the EAD’s formal managerial and operational responsibilities and the removal statistics attributed to ERO, but available reporting does not provide a granular, day-by-day duty log or internal memos outlining every operational decision Homan made while EAD; therefore specifics about his individual tactical orders or internal prioritization choices beyond public statements and agency metrics are not fully verifiable in the supplied sources ^{[1] [5]}.