Have people legally in the US or US citizens been deported?
Executive summary
Yes — multiple reputable investigations and lawsuits show that people who are legally in the United States, including some who are U.S. citizens, have been wrongly detained and in documented instances deported; the scale is contested because federal agencies do not reliably track citizenship investigations or outcomes [1] [2].
1. Concrete evidence that U.S. citizens have been deported
Government audits, civil-rights groups and academic clinics have assembled concrete examples and counts: a U.S. Government Accountability Office review found evidence that ICE removed potentially 70 people it later identified as possible citizens during the period it examined [1], while legal researchers and watchdogs have tallied higher totals and hundreds of detentions of people later shown to be U.S. citizens [1] [3].
2. The numbers are disputed because the system itself is opaque
Agencies do not maintain reliable, consistent records that would let outside researchers or the government definitively count how often citizenship claims are mishandled — the GAO explicitly concluded ICE “does not know the extent” of enforcement actions against potential citizens because of incomplete systems and data-entry rules that can leave citizenship fields unchanged after investigations [2] [1].
3. High-profile cases show how failures occur in practice
Documented individual cases range from Mark Lyttle, a U.S. citizen with mental disabilities who was wrongfully detained and deported to Mexico and later settled a suit against the government [4] [5], to Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom courts found was wrongly deported to El Salvador amid litigation and whose removal prompted judicial rebukes [6] [7], and a college student flown to Honduras after an officer failed to flag a court order — an error the government apologized for in court [8] [9].
4. Alternate narratives and government pushback exist
Department of Homeland Security officials and some press releases have disputed particular allegations — for example, DHS publicly stated one ACLU-supported lawsuit was “based on false claims” after asserting a parent chose to take a U.S. citizen child on removal [10] — underscoring that some contested cases hinge on facts about consent, family choices, or procedural complexity and that not every allegation of wrongful deportation survives legal scrutiny [10].
5. Why mistaken deportations happen: documented system flaws
Investigations and advocates point to recurring causes: misclassification in databases, failure to update records after citizenship investigations, aggressive enforcement cultures lacking appointed counsel for those in immigration proceedings, language and disability barriers, and occasional deliberate disregard for judicial orders — problems flagged by the GAO, civil-rights groups, and court findings [2] [4] [6].
6. What the evidence supports and what remains uncertain
The reporting and litigation establish that wrongful detention and deportation of U.S. citizens have occurred and that courts have ordered remedial action in several instances [4] [7]; however, the true scale is unknown because DHS/ICE/CBP recordkeeping is incomplete and third-party tallies vary widely — from dozens in some government analyses to thousands in broader academic counts — meaning policymakers and investigators lack a definitive baseline to measure the problem [1] [11] [3].
7. Consequences and calls for reform
Because citizens can face prolonged detention, removal and lengthy litigation to clear their status, advocates, members of Congress and courts have demanded investigations, better tracking, and procedural safeguards such as access to counsel and stricter adherence to court orders; those demands rest both on the documented harms to individuals and on the systemic data failures that prevent reliable oversight [12] [2] [4].