How many wrongful deportations did ICE conduct in 2024?

1. What ICE publicly reports — big totals, not a “wrongful” line item

ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations publishes arrest and removal totals — for example, ICE reported nearly 68,000 removals in a single quarter of FY2024 and the agency’s FY2024 numbers include roughly 271,484 removals cited by commentators — but those public dashboards and annual reports list removals by category (criminality, method, country) rather than a count of deportations later adjudicated as wrongful ^{[3] [1]}. The ICE statistics page and press releases focus on operational metrics; they do not provide an explicit field called “wrongful deportations” ^{[4] [3]}.

2. Court-identified wrongful deportations — narrow, documented examples

News reporting and litigation show specific cases where courts found deportations improper and ordered returns. Time reported that in less than six months courts had directed the administration to bring back at least four people it had deported, describing individual wrongful-deportation cases with supporting court documents ^[2]. These documented, court-mandated reversals are concrete but represent a small, legally confirmed subset — not a comprehensive national tally ^[2].

3. Why a simple count is hard to produce

Multiple practical and legal reasons explain the absence of a single number: ICE’s public datasets emphasize removals and arrests by fiscal quarter and case characteristics rather than post-removal error findings; advocacy groups and researchers compile case lists and FOIA-derived datasets but those are partial and often lag behind current operations; and some alleged wrongful deportations are litigated and remedied over time, meaning any snapshot can miss later developments ^{[3] [5]}. The Deportation Data Project stresses that it posts individual-level data but does not itself provide summary “wrongful” counts — analysts must derive those figures ^[5].

4. Advocacy, litigation, and watchdog findings suggest undercounting risk

Advocates and watchdog groups have found repetitive problems — from misidentification of U.S. citizens as removable to courthouse arrests that strip people of hearings — indicating systemic vulnerabilities that can produce wrongful removals even if not tallied centrally ^{[6] [7]}. For example, the American Immigration Council’s analysis of older data showed thousands wrongly flagged as potentially removable in earlier years, suggesting historical patterns that could recur absent fixes ^[6]. Recent class-action litigation alleges widespread courthouse arrests and expedited removals that could represent many improperly handled cases, but those suits do not yet translate into a definitive national count ^[7].

5. Competing perspectives: agency reporting vs. critics

ICE and DHS frame their statistics as measures of enforcement activity — arrests, detentions, removals — to support public-safety and border-control claims ^{[3] [8]}. Critics — legal aid groups, immigrant-rights organizations, and some reporters — emphasize due process problems, individual stories of wrongful deportation, and data gaps that prevent knowing the full scope of errors ^{[2] [7] [5]}. Both viewpoints are present in the record: agency data document scale; litigation and reporting document individual and systemic failures.

6. How to get closer to an answer

A reliable, comprehensive count would require: (a) an agency-produced audit or explicit data field for removals later vacated or ordered remedied by courts; (b) consolidated FOIA-derived individual-level datasets that are regularly updated and analyzed for post-removal litigation outcomes; or (c) academic or government investigations that reconcile ICE removal records with subsequent court rulings and repatriation orders ^{[5] [3]}. Current public sources do not show such an authoritative reconciliation for 2024.

7. Bottom line for your question

Available sources do not state a single, authoritative number of “wrongful deportations” by ICE in 2024. What is documented are large totals of removals in FY2024 (hundreds of thousands) together with a small set of court-ordered returns and ongoing litigation and advocacy claims pointing to additional, unquantified errors ^{[3] [1] [2] [7]}. If you want a working estimate, the best next step is to compile FOIA or Deportation Data Project records and cross-check them against court orders and published case lists — but that analysis is not present in the sources above ^[5].