Has the US deported any actual US citizens with current citizenship

1. What the official records and watchdogs say

A Government Accountability Office review and academic tracking both found that ICE and CBP have identified and acted against individuals who later proved to be U.S. citizens or who were wrongly treated as noncitizens, and the GAO warned that ICE does not systematically track citizenship investigations or reliably update citizenship fields in its systems — a gap that leaves the true number unknown ^[3]. Independent analyses cited by the American Immigration Council and TRAC reported hundreds of potential citizen misidentifications and documented that ICE arrested 674 potential U.S. citizens, detained 121, and — in the time frame that watchdogs examined — deported as many as 70 people whom available data suggested were U.S. citizens or potential citizens, while noting the real total may be higher ^[2].

2. Individual cases that courts and advocates have documented

High-profile legal actions and settlements have produced concrete examples: Mark Lyttle, born in North Carolina and with documented cognitive disabilities, was detained and deported to Mexico before later returning and settling a suit against the government, a case the ACLU has highlighted as emblematic of the problem ^[1]. Northwestern’s Deportation Research Clinic and other reporting document cases such as Andres Robles and Roberto Dominguez, who were removed and later demonstrated U.S. citizenship or otherwise successfully contested the removals ^[4].

3. Recent waves and contested deportations under scrutiny

Reporting around mass deportation operations during the Trump administration identified several instances where courts later described removals as “lawless” or where administrations acknowledged “administrative errors,” including the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia and the rapid removal of Jordin Melgar-Salmerón, which federal courts ordered be remedied ^{[5] [6]}. News outlets and court filings show the government has at times apologized for mistakes — for example in the case of a Massachusetts college student flown to Honduras — while simultaneously defending the removals in litigation ^{[7] [8]}.

4. Why errors happen: data, procedures and bias

Multiple sources identify systemic causes: inconsistent ICE guidance on citizenship investigations, failure to update data fields after inquiries, reliance on flawed or incomplete documentation, and racial profiling that increases the likelihood that people of color will be targeted for enforcement — all factors that create opportunities for U.S. citizens to be misidentified and removed ^{[3] [2]}. Advocacy groups and scholars argue these structural failures, plus the lack of appointed counsel in immigration proceedings, make erroneous detention and deportation more likely ^{[9] [1]}.

5. Limits of the evidence and competing narratives

While advocacy organizations, courts, and reporters have documented individual wrongful deportations and produced aggregated counts, government datasets are imperfect and the DHS has at times disputed characterizations of specific cases; the executive branch has defended some removals as proper or as mistakes that do not alter the underlying immigration case, creating a contested public record ^{[7] [5]}. Academic and watchdog sources caution that available figures (for example the “70 deported” figure cited by the American Immigration Council) are based on partial data and should be treated as minimums rather than definitive totals ^{[2] [3]}.

6. Bottom line

The United States has, on multiple documented occasions, deported individuals who were later shown to be U.S. citizens or whom courts found had been removed unlawfully; accountability has sometimes come only after litigation, settlements, or public pressure, and systemic recordkeeping and procedural shortfalls mean the full scale of such wrongful deportations is not definitively known ^{[1] [4] [2] [3]}.