Obama Awarded Homan At the Nadir of ICE Enforcement

Tom Homan is the current White House Executive Associate Director of Enforcement and Removal Operations related to immigration enforcement, or informally known as the border czar. His active use of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to deport criminal illegal migrants has earned him the ire of Democratic activists who are against stricter enforcement.

But ironically enough, Homan was hired by the Obama Administration in 2013 and that administration awarded him the Presidential Rank for Distinguished Service in 2015 for leading Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) and spearheading the management and reform of the largest civil detention system in the nation. Under his helm as an executive at ICE and for which he was given the award, Homan helped remove 316,000 persons in the U.S. who were likely here illegally with little outcry from pro-migration activists at the time.

The irony may go deeper as the period around Homan’s award was at the lowest point of illegal migrant enforcement of the last decade. The 316,00 removals were significantly less than the 413,000 a few years earlier in 2013 when Homan started his position.

According to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) data, DHS returned 1.7 million to their home countries in 2000. Fifteen years later in 2015 it was less than one-tenth that amount—130,000. While that trend pre-dated Homan and Obama’s tenure, the number of removals—returns based on an order of removal, which had been rising throughout the decade, started distinctly declining around 2012 right before Homan was nominated for his post at ICE in 2013 and would be 25 percent lower by 2015.

Those numbers would decline further through 2019, most of it under Homan’s tenure as director of ICE, which ended in 2018.