How many U.S. citizens have been detained or deported by ICE since 2020, and what official records document those incidents?
Executive summary
There is no authoritative, publicly published tally in the supplied records that enumerates how many U.S. citizens have been detained or deported by ICE since 2020; the federal datasets that do exist focus on people identified as noncitizens and have gaps and reporting caveats that make verifying rare citizen‑mistake cases difficult [1] [2]. Independent researchers and FOIA-based projects (not ICE’s routine public dashboards) are the primary sources used to investigate and document individual mistaken‑citizen detentions, but the sources provided do not contain a definitive count [3] [4].
1. What the official ICE and DHS datasets actually publish
ICE’s public Enforcement and Removal Operations pages publish counts of arrests, detentions, and removals and break those numbers down by citizenship categories in many tables, but the agency’s routine public dashboards are primarily structured and labeled around removals of noncitizens and do not present a clear, readily accessible, verified list of U.S. citizens detained or removed as citizens since 2020 [1] [5]. The Office of Homeland Security Statistics (OHSS) maintains monthly tables and a Statistical System of Record (SSOR) that include book‑ins and book‑outs by citizenship and are described as the authoritative DHS statistical source — however, those products are complex, periodically incomplete, and require validation to identify anomalous citizenship entries [6] [7].
2. Why a clear public count is missing: reporting gaps and GAO’s findings
Federal watchdog analysis has flagged data gaps that undermine any simple answer: the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that ICE’s public reports understate total detentions because ICE excludes certain temporary facility bookings from published counts and recommended stronger, clearer reporting of all detentions and methodology explanations — recommendations DHS did not fully accept [2]. That GAO finding means publicly posted totals can be incomplete and that extracting rare cases (for example, U.S. citizens mistakenly booked) requires access to lower‑level records not always released in standard dashboards [2].
3. How independent projects and FOIA records are used to find citizen‑mistake cases
Because routine ICE releases are not structured to spotlight erroneous citizen detentions, researchers rely on FOIA releases and consolidated datasets to investigate specific incidents; the Deportation Data Project and related FOIA‑obtained ICE detention stints are used by academic and nonprofit dashboards (Vera, Deportation Data Project) to reconstruct detention records and identify anomalous cases, but those projects are curated and not an official ICE tally [3] [4]. Journalistic outlets and watchdogs have used those FOIA datasets to surface examples and trends, but the materials provided to this analysis do not produce a single, government‑verified count of U.S. citizens detained or deported since 2020 [8] [3].
4. What can be stated with confidence from the provided sources
ICE and DHS publish removals and detention statistics and the OHSS SSOR contains citizenship fields that, in principle, would allow a search for U.S. citizen entries, and FOIA‑based datasets have been successfully used by researchers to find individual misclassification incidents — but the supplied sources collectively show that an official, consolidated, public accounting of U.S. citizens detained or deported since 2020 is not present in the routine ICE publications and that the GAO found ICE’s detention reporting incomplete [1] [7] [2] [3]. In short: the infrastructure to document such cases exists across ICE and OHSS records and FOIA releases, but the public datasets and dashboards provided do not supply a definitive number.
5. Alternative perspectives, stakes and hidden agendas
Advocates and independent researchers emphasize that the absence of a clear count conceals civil‑liberty risks and impedes accountability, arguing for mandatory, transparent reporting of every detention and citizenship field; ICE and DHS have resisted some of those reporting prescriptions and emphasize operational and data‑quality caveats, which can reflect an institutional interest in limiting exposure of errors in detention processes [2] [8]. Conversely, ICE and DHS stress that most published removals are of noncitizens and that routine data releases already cover enforcement totals — a position complicated by GAO’s call for fuller disclosure and by independent FOIA reconstructions that reveal both systemic gaps and rare but consequential misclassifications [1] [2] [3].
6. Bottom line for researchers and readers
No single, official public tally of U.S. citizens detained or deported by ICE since 2020 is provided in the supplied ICE/DHS public dashboards and reports; investigators must therefore rely on the OHSS/SSOR records, ICE’s detention and removals tables, GAO findings about reporting weaknesses, and FOIA‑compiled datasets (Deportation Data Project, Vera) to identify and document individual incidents — and those sources, collectively, show the capability to find cases but not an authoritative aggregate count in the public record supplied here [7] [1] [2] [3] [4].