Have any US citizens been deported in the last year by ice?
Executive summary
Yes — multiple reputable reports from 2025 document instances in which people identified as U.S. citizens were wrongly arrested, detained and in some cases deported by immigration authorities, though the scale of those incidents is unclear because the federal government does not systematically track citizen detentions and ICE’s public removals data do not report deportations of citizens separately [1] [2] [3].
1. What the reporting actually documents: individual cases, not mass policy
Investigative outlets, civil-rights groups and congressional statements catalog individual episodes in which U.S. citizens were swept up by enforcement operations — including news accounts and legal filings showing wrongful arrests, detentions and at least some removals — examples that prompted legal challenges and urgent calls for congressional fixes [1] [4] [5]. Wikipedia’s aggregation of reporting cites specific episodes in 2025 where ICE records or court filings indicate U.S. citizens were detained and, in at least some narratives, deported or nearly deported, spurring litigation and public outcry [1]. Representative Pramila Jayapal’s office framed these reports as the basis for legislation to bar ICE from targeting citizens, pointing to multiple reported wrongful arrests, detentions and deportations since the administration’s return [4].
2. The legal baseline: birthright citizens cannot lawfully be deported, but naturalized citizens face different risks
Constitutional and statutory law hold that U.S.-born citizens cannot be deported, a legal principle reiterated by attorneys and analysts, while naturalized citizens are vulnerable to denaturalization proceedings in limited circumstances — a distinction emphasized by immigration attorneys and advocacy coverage in 2025 [6]. Reporting notes the Department of Justice’s stated priorities to pursue denaturalization in specified categories, which complicates headlines about “citizens” when cases involve naturalized status under legal challenge rather than U.S.-born citizenship [6].
3. Data gaps and institutional blind spots that hide the true scope
Multiple sources warn that federal data systems do not provide a clear answer on how often citizens are arrested or removed: ProPublica and others reported that the U.S. government does not systematically track citizen detentions by immigration agents, and ICE’s public statistics focus on country-of-citizenship tallies without isolating U.S. citizens in accessible, transparent ways [1] [2]. That absence of reliable administrative tracking means journalists and advocates must piece cases together from court filings, field office records and local reporting — which can reveal serious failures but cannot easily produce a comprehensive nationwide count [1] [7].
4. Enforcement context: a dramatic expansion of detention and deportation capacity in 2025
Independent analyses and advocacy reports document a sharp expansion of ICE detention and removals in 2025 — detention populations surged and deportations increased sharply from the prior year — creating conditions in which administrative errors and overreach could yield wrongful detentions and removals even as the agency touts mass removals as a policy win [8] [9] [3]. DHS and ICE have reported hundreds of thousands of removals and a substantial rise in detained populations, while watchdog groups detail how tent camps, more facilities and curtailed release practices changed incentives inside the system [8] [9] [3].
5. Competing narratives, agendas and what’s left unanswered
Advocates and civil-rights groups emphasize systemic abuse, wrongful deportations and the need for statutory protections for citizens; ICE and DHS emphasize enforcement metrics and claim progress on removals without acknowledging a quantified citizen-deportation figure [4] [3]. Reporting documents concrete failures and at least some deportations of people identified as U.S. citizens or treated as such in 2025, but because official data do not disaggregate or reliably track citizen detentions, the overall prevalence and whether deportations involved U.S.-born versus denaturalized or erroneously categorized people remain open questions [1] [2].
6. Bottom line
Public reporting and legal filings from 2025 establish that U.S. citizens have been wrongfully arrested and detained by immigration authorities, and several high-profile cases describe deportations or near-deportations of people identified as citizens; however, no centralized, official tally exists to measure how common those events are, and legal experts stress the difference between U.S.-born citizens (protected from lawful deportation) and naturalized citizens facing denaturalization proceedings [1] [6] [2].