What are the annual numbers of missing persons reported after ICE or CBP detention in the last decade?
Executive summary
Available government reporting and public datasets do not provide a single, verifiable annual tally of people who were reported “missing after” being held by ICE or Customs and Border Protection (CBP) across the last decade; agency statistics focus on encounters, detentions, removals, and migrant deaths or unidentified remains rather than a labeled “missing after detention” series [1] [2] [3]. Independent reviewers have repeatedly flagged gaps in how Border Patrol and related programs collect and publish data on migrants found dead or unaccounted for, so any claim of an annual missing-person total tied to ICE/CBP custody cannot be substantiated from the sources provided GAO-25-107548/index.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">[4].
1. What the agencies publish — arrests, detentions and deaths, not “missing-after-detention”
ICE and CBP publish frequent statistics on arrests, detentions, book-ins/book-outs, and removals—datasets that document how many people were encountered, detained, transferred, or removed, and ICE releases detailed detention spreadsheets and flow tables that track book-ins and facility stays [1] [5] [6]. CBP publishes border enforcement and encounter statistics and runs a Missing Alien Program focused on preventing and responding to migrant deaths along the border [2] [7]. Those products do not, however, present an annual line that reads “number of persons reported missing after release from ICE/CBP custody,” so they cannot be used to produce the direct annual counts requested [1] [2] [7].
2. Where “missing” shows up in official work: Missing Migrant Program and unidentified remains
The clearest official thread that approaches “missing” is CBP’s Missing Migrant Program and its statutorily required reporting on unidentified remains found along the southwest border; CBP first began sending such reports to Congress in 2022 and continued in 2023 and 2024, and GAO’s reviews reference those reports and document what they contain about migrant deaths and rescue efforts [4]. GAO also found Border Patrol had not consistently collected or reported complete data on migrant deaths and that its data systems and reporting suffer limitations—an explicit caution against using those reports as a comprehensive accounting of missing persons tied to custody [4].
3. Independent datasets exist but don’t solve the “missing after custody” gap
Research projects such as the Deportation Data Project host near-original ICE datasets on arrests, detainers, detentions and removals that are valuable for tracking enforcement activity; they do not, however, create a derived series for people later reported missing after release or transfer, and the project itself notes CBP and ICE responsibilities overlap and are split across datasets [8] [5]. State missing-person registries (for example California’s DOJ missing-persons stats) publish large annual counts of missing-person entries, but those totals are not disaggregated in the public reports to indicate prior ICE or CBP custody, so they cannot be mapped to federal detention events from the sources provided [9].
4. What independent oversight says about data quality and limits to answering the question
GAO reviews explicitly call out incomplete Border Patrol data collection and reporting for migrant deaths and unidentified remains and note CBP’s reporting to Congress began only recently, which limits retrospective decade-long aggregation from those sources alone [4]. ICE’s public statistics and monthly detention spreadsheets are granular about custody but not about post-release disappearance reporting, leaving a structural gap: enforcement tallies exist; systematic post-custody missing-person reporting does not appear as a compiled federal statistic in the sources provided [1] [6] [5].
5. Conclusion and pathway to a defensible count
Based on the materials reviewed, no authoritative annual series of “missing persons reported after ICE or CBP detention” for the last decade can be produced from existing public agency releases and third‑party datasets cited here; the available records cover detentions, encounters, removals, and separate reporting on migrant deaths/unidentified remains but not the cross‑referenced “missing-after-release” metric the question requests [1] [3] [4] [8]. A defensible effort to generate those annual numbers would require linking ICE/CBP detention and transfer records with missing-person entries from state and local law-enforcement databases (or FOIA disclosures), plus reconciling CBP’s Missing Migrant/Unidentified Remains reports and addressing the data-collection gaps GAO identified [4] [8] [9].