How often does ICE detain US citizens by mistake in 2020-2024?

1. How a major investigative tally exposed a hidden problem and forced oversight action

ProPublica’s project identified over 170 cases in which individuals later determined to be U.S. citizens were detained by immigration agents, often under contested circumstances such as questions about citizenship or allegations of assaulting officers; many of those cases were dismissed or never led to charges, and some included accounts of physical mistreatment while held ^[1]. That investigative count is the clearest public metric that specifically targets misdetentions of citizens for 2020–2024 and it served as the immediate catalyst for formal congressional inquiries announced by lawmakers in both chambers who cited concerns about racial profiling and due process violations ^{[2] [3]}. The ProPublica dataset is drawn from local reporting, court records and interviews, so it illuminates discrete incidents and patterns that federal reporting systems do not capture.

2. Why federal reporting does not answer the “how often” question

Government data from ICE and the GAO tracks total arrests, detentions, and removals but typically records detainees by claimed or confirmed nationality and excludes certain administrative steps such as “initial book‑ins,” which understates the number of people processed into custody; crucially, those official data products do not contain a routine field that flags mistaken detentions of U.S. citizens, so they cannot produce an accurate frequency for errors of this nature ^[4]. Independent audits and oversight reports on ICE detention focus on aggregate volumes, mortality, and medical care rather than systematic misidentification of citizenship, meaning investigators must piece together incidents from case files, local court dockets, and journalistic investigations to approximate the scope ^{[5] [6]}. The absence of a required internal reporting category for citizen misdetentions creates a data gap that prevents definitive agency-level counts.

3. Oversight reports show isolated tragedies and procedural failures, not a full tally

Inspectors general and watchdogs documenting deaths and systemic failures in ICE custody have cited specific mistaken‑identity detentions as evidence of broader procedural breakdowns; for example, death‑investigation reports reference cases where individuals were detained by mistake, illustrating that errors occur and can have fatal consequences, but these reports are incident‑based and do not quantify how often mistakes happen across the system ^{[6] [7]}. Those oversight records underscore failures in verification, medical screening and record‑matching and demonstrate how a single misidentification can cascade into prolonged detention and harm, reinforcing the ProPublica finding that mistaken detentions are real and consequential even if they remain incompletely measured in federal statistics.

4. Congressional response: investigation, records requests, and political framing

Following the investigative reporting, members of Congress from both the House and Senate launched joint investigations and demanded agency records to determine how often U.S. citizens are detained and whether racial profiling or funding practices contributed to the problem; sponsors include Rep. Robert Garcia and Sen. Richard Blumenthal, who publicly framed the pattern as a civil‑rights and due‑process concern and pushed for documentation showing how citizenship verification is handled during raids ^{[2] [3]}. The congressional inquiries aim to compel ICE and the Department of Homeland Security to reveal internal metrics, after‑action reports and training materials that could either validate ProPublica’s count or produce a different official figure, and those investigations are active levers for obtaining systematic agency data that currently do not exist in public ICE datasets.

5. Bottom line: what we know, what we don’t, and how to close the gap

The best available public evidence indicates at least 170 documented incidents of U.S. citizens being detained by immigration agents in 2020–2024, along with corroborating oversight cases showing procedural lapses, but no federal dataset produces an authoritative frequency or rate because ICE and GAO reporting lack a standardized mechanism to record mistaken citizen detentions ^{[1] [4] [6]}. Closing that data gap will require legislative or administrative mandates for ICE to record and publish instances where custody is placed on individuals later confirmed as U.S. citizens, plus independent audits to validate agency records; until such reforms or disclosures occur, the combined picture from investigative journalism and oversight reporting remains the most complete public account, showing a meaningful problem but not a definitive national count ^{[1] [3] [4]}.