How many U.S. citizens has ICE wrongly deported in the last decade?
Executive summary
There is no definitive public tally for how many U.S. citizens ICE wrongly deported in the last decade; available government and watchdog reporting documents clear cases and troubling patterns but also significant gaps in recordkeeping that make an exact count impossible to produce from the published sources [1]. The most-cited, concrete figure from government review and watchdog analysis is that at least 70 U.S. citizens were wrongly removed in the period analyzed by the Government Accountability Office and summarized by the American Immigration Council, but that finding is framed as a minimum and likely undercounts the true scale because DHS agencies do not reliably track citizenship investigations or errors [1].
1. What the official records actually show — and what they don’t
A public ICE enforcement-statistics portal catalogs arrests, detentions and removals by country of citizenship and criminal-history categories, but those data are organized around operational categories rather than post-hoc determinations of wrongful removals, and ICE/CBP recordkeeping has been criticized as insufficient to identify all mistaken citizenship inquiries or removals [2] [1]. The American Immigration Council summarizes government and watchdog work noting that neither ICE nor CBP maintains good enough records to determine how many people were arrested or deported in error, which directly limits any effort to produce a definitive count for a recent ten-year span [1].
2. The “at least 70” figure: what it means and its limits
The often-cited benchmark — “as many as 70” U.S. citizens deported in error — comes from analyses summarized by the American Immigration Council and based on Government Accountability Office findings; that figure is presented as an aggregate of documented wrongful removals during the timeframe the investigators examined, and the organizations stress it is a lower-bound estimate because of incomplete records [1]. The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) analysis that identified thousands of potentially misidentified U.S. citizens reinforces the idea that official removals data undercount errors: TRAC found at least 2,840 U.S. citizens were flagged as potentially eligible for removal between 2002 and 2017, a much larger pool than the small number of confirmed wrongful deportations [1].
3. Patterns and corroborating signals beyond raw counts
Scholars and advocates cite systematic problems that increase the likelihood of citizen misidentification: academic studies have found nontrivial shares of people in immigration custody are U.S. citizens, and watchdog reports describe aggressive arrest targets and high detention volumes that create incentives for mistakes and racialized shortcuts in enforcement [3] [4] [5]. Reporting from 2025–2026 documents multiple high-profile wrongful detentions and contested citizenship claims that have gone viral in social media and court filings, underscoring that wrongful processing of citizens continues to occur even if those cases don’t always end in deportation [6] [7] [8].
4. Why a precise “last-decade” number cannot be responsibly stated from public reporting
The core obstacle to a precise decade-long count is record quality: both the American Immigration Council and GAO-related summaries warn DHS datasets and internal practices do not reliably flag or reconcile cases where U.S. citizenship was later confirmed after removal or detention, so public sources can only produce minimums or case compilations rather than comprehensive totals [1]. Independent researchers therefore produce bounds and exemplars — such as the confirmed 70 removals reported by watchdogs and thousands of potential misidentifications in TRAC’s longer-term analysis — but no source in the reviewed reporting offers an authoritative, audited total for the last ten years [1].
5. Bottom line — what can be stated with confidence
It can be stated with confidence that wrongful deportations of U.S. citizens have occurred and that government and watchdog reviews have confirmed at least dozens of wrongful removals and identified thousands of potential misidentifications over broader time windows [1]. It cannot be stated, based on the available public reporting, how many U.S. citizens were wrongly deported specifically in the last decade because DHS recordkeeping and public reporting do not provide a clean, audited count for that period [1] [2].