How many legal residents have been arrested by ice
Executive summary
There is no single, publicly available definitive tally in the provided reporting that answers “how many legal residents have been arrested by ICE”; federal datasets and investigative counts document large volumes of ICE arrests overall but do not cleanly publish a comprehensive count of lawful permanent residents (LPRs) arrested, and independent investigations have instead compiled partial tallies of U.S. citizens and other groups caught up in enforcement [1] [2]. Multiple sources show ICE made tens to hundreds of thousands of arrests in recent years and that some U.S. citizens and presumably some legal residents have been detained or even deported, but the precise count of LPR arrests is not present in the supplied reporting [1].
1. What the public data do show: massive overall arrest volumes but sparse status breakdowns
ICE’s public statistics and independent trackers document large numbers of administrative and criminal arrests — for example, agency and third‑party summaries show tens of thousands to well over 100,000 arrests in single recent years and sustained daily arrest totals in 2025, but those datasets primarily classify people by immigration enforcement categories rather than a neat “legal resident” checkbox, limiting their use for answering the specific question about lawful permanent residents .
2. What investigative counts and audits found about Americans detained or deported
Investigative reporting and government audits have flagged that ICE has arrested and even deported some U.S. citizens: the Government Accountability Office and other reporting showed up to 70 U.S. citizens deported between 2015 and 2020 and flagged at least hundreds of potential citizen detentions in some counts, while outlets such as ProPublica and regional reporters compiled lists that put citizen detentions well over 170 in recent enforcement waves — these figures underscore errors in enforcement but do not translate directly into a count of lawful permanent residents arrested by ICE [1] [2] [3].
3. Why a precise count of “legal residents arrested by ICE” is elusive in the record
The supplied sources highlight three practical barriers: ICE’s public statistics focus on categories like “administrative arrests” versus criminal arrests and detention counts without a consistent public field distinguishing LPRs from other noncitizens; FOIA‑processed datasets and academic analyses reveal location, conviction status and daily arrest volume but often contain incomplete coding for immigration status; and investigative compilations tend to concentrate on notable citizen mistakes or overall arrest surges rather than systematically enumerating LPRs across years — together these limitations mean reporting can show scale and examples but not a single authoritative number of legal‑resident arrests .
4. Competing narratives and what the partial evidence implies
Advocacy and investigative outlets emphasize wrongful detentions of citizens and noncitizens without criminal records as evidence of overreach and racial profiling, documenting individual cases and hundreds of citizen detentions [2] [3], while enforcement‑focused outlets and ICE statements point to arrests of people with criminal records and argue the agency is targeting public‑safety threats . Both perspectives are supported by the sources: high aggregate arrest rates and specific documented mistakes exist simultaneously, but neither side’s materials in the provided reporting produce a comprehensive national count of LPR arrests .
5. The bottom line supported by the reporting
The reporting supplied does not provide a definitive numeric answer to “how many legal residents have been arrested by ICE”; available official and investigative sources confirm large overall arrest volumes and document dozens to hundreds of mistaken citizen detentions and some deportations, but they stop short of offering a clear, aggregate count of lawful permanent residents arrested that can be cited as definitive — the current public record in these sources is therefore insufficient to produce the precise number requested [1] [2].