How many confirmed cases exist of U.S. citizens being detained or deported by ICE since 2015?
Executive summary
The best publicly available federal audit found that, from fiscal year 2015 through March 2020, ICE arrested 674 people, detained 121, and removed 70 "potential U.S. citizens," and those figures are the closest thing in the record to a confirmed count for that period . Federal reviewers and advocates caution the true number since 2015 could be higher because ICE and CBP do not consistently track citizenship-investigation cases and data fields are incomplete .
1. What the official audit actually counted: arrests, detentions and removals
A Government Accountability Office review of ICE records concluded that available ICE data indicate 674 arrests, 121 detentions, and 70 removals of individuals identified as potential U.S. citizens from FY2015 through the second quarter of FY2020 (March 2020) — the GAO emphasizes these are "potential" citizens based on the imperfect datasets it reviewed . Advocacy groups and policy analysts have since cited the GAO’s headline finding — up to 70 deportations of potential U.S. citizens in that window — as the most concrete federal estimate in the public domain .
2. Why “confirmed” is a fraught term: data gaps and definitions
ICE’s public enforcement statistics are released and updated, but the agency warns that its data fluctuate until a fiscal-year lock and that the datasets do not systematically annotate or resolve citizenship investigations across agencies, which undercuts any claim to a definitive count of confirmed citizen detentions or removals [1]. The GAO flagged inconsistent guidance within ICE on how to investigate citizenship and found that neither ICE nor CBP systematically track cases involving citizenship inquiries, meaning many encounters cannot be confidently labeled as “citizen” errors from agency records alone .
3. Corroborating reporting, academic work and advocacy views
Independent organizations — including the American Immigration Council and research commentators — have relied on the GAO numbers and warned the true toll may be higher, noting both historical examples of mistaken detentions and the practical barriers to documenting citizen misidentification without better recordkeeping and legal representation for detainees . Scholars and the Brennan Center point to prior analyses showing a nontrivial share of people in immigration custody were U.S. citizens in earlier time slices, underscoring that isolated misidentification has precedent even if the scale remains hard to pin down precisely from ICE’s public files .
4. What the agency says and what the public data allow
ICE’s own statistics portal publishes arrests, removals and detention figures and vouches for the integrity of the data as posted while warning that data can change until the fiscal year is locked, but the portal does not provide a clean ledger of citizenship-investigation outcomes that would let outsiders independently confirm every asserted citizen deportation [1]. Departmental statistical systems and monthly OHSS tables provide extensive enforcement breakdowns by citizenship and criminality categories, but GAO and researchers have found those products insufficient to produce a definitive count of confirmed U.S. citizens detained or removed without additional case-level verification .
5. The bottom line — a precise, evidence-backed answer
Based on the GAO’s review of ICE records — the most authoritative public audit available in the sources reviewed — there were 70 removals of individuals identified in ICE data as potential U.S. citizens from FY2015 through March 2020; the same GAO work reports 121 detentions and 674 arrests of potential citizens over that span . Because ICE and CBP do not systematically record and resolve citizenship-investigation outcomes, and because subsequent public reporting has not produced a comprehensive, validated tally for 2020–2025, these GAO figures are the clearest documented counts available in the public record cited here, but they should be read as minimums rather than definitive totals [1].