What are the documented individual cases of U.S. citizens deported in error since 2025?

1. Confirmed individual case cited by advocates and legal groups

The most clear-cut, widely reported instance after 2025 involves Chanthila Souvannarath, whom immigrant-rights groups say was detained by ICE in June 2025 while asserting a substantial claim to U.S. citizenship, pursued habeas relief in federal court, and was nevertheless removed to Laos — an action advocates called a violation of a court order and an apparent deportation of a person with a strong citizenship claim ^[1].

2. Cases reported in congressional and press accounts with partial documentation

Congressional filings and investigative press reporting document other instances where U.S. citizens — including a toddler deported with her family in April 2025 and a handful of adults who say they were wrongly removed or issued deportation orders — were caught up in removals or transfers in 2025, but many of these accounts lack full public confirmation of final removal abroad or are contested by authorities ^{[4] [5] [2]}.

3. Investigative tallies show many detentions, few fully verified removals

ProPublica’s review found more than 170 Americans detained by immigration agents through October 2025 and documented individual stories of citizens arrested, held for days and in at least one past case previously deported by mistake, but their accounting emphasizes detentions and wrongful custody more than an incontrovertible list of post‑2025 deportations of confirmed citizens ^[2].

4. Government pushback, formal denials, and competing narratives

The Department of Homeland Security publicly pushed back against reporting that it “deports U.S. citizens,” issuing a statement that it does not and characterizing some media claims as false while describing particular detainee stories as legally justified arrests rather than citizenship‑based removals ^[3]. At the same time, members of Congress and civil‑rights organizations demanded investigations into rising numbers of wrongful detentions and removals under second‑term enforcement priorities, signaling an institutional dispute over facts and accountability ^[6].

5. High‑profile administrative errors that influenced concern but aren’t always citizen‑deportation confirmations

Reporting from 2025 documents administrative errors and troubling paperwork — for example, reissued expedited‑removal forms and past cases where ICE records misidentified U.S. citizens — that fueled claims of wrongful deportations; some of those stories involve people previously corrected as citizens whose records resurfaced in 2025, but public sources do not uniformly demonstrate final, lawful deportations of U.S. citizens in every such instance ^{[7] [5]}.

6. What the record does and does not show, and why the tally is unresolved

Available sources show at least one vividly documented removal contested as a wrongful deportation (Souvannarath) and several reported instances of citizens—including a child—being expelled or issued deportation paperwork in 2025, but they also show major gaps: DHS does not publish a definitive public count, investigative tallies focus on detentions not verified removals, and the government sometimes disputes media accounts, leaving the number of confirmed, individual U.S. citizens actually deported in error since 2025 unclear and contested ^{[1] [2] [3] [6]}.

7. Stakes, oversight demands and next steps for verification

Because congressional offices, civil‑liberties groups and investigative reporters have all called for transparency and probes into ICE practices—and because advocates have produced court records, lawsuits and advocacy briefs naming alleged wrongful removals—the most reliable path to a definitive list is systematic disclosure by DHS and court verification of each removal; absent that, public reporting will continue to identify individual contested cases but not a definitive count ^{[6] [2]}.