Where there ICE agent shootings during Obama years

1. What the supplied reporting actually covers: recent 2026 shootings, not Obama-era field shootings

The material assembled for this query centers on high-profile shootings in January 2026—fatal and non-fatal uses of force by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis and Portland—and the political fallout that followed, including statements from former presidents and local officials ^{[1] [5] [6] [2]}. Multiple outlets in the set analyze those 2026 incidents and related protests, but none of the items explicitly catalog a shooting-by-ICE-agent that took place during Barack Obama’s presidency ^{[1] [3] [7]}.

2. Distinguishing deaths in custody from agent-involved shootings in the field

Advocacy organizations released a 2025 report stating that 56 individuals died while in ICE custody during the Obama administration, a statistic about detention deaths that is distinct from shootings by ICE agents during enforcement operations ^[4]. The difference matters: detention deaths involve medical care, oversight and facility conditions, whereas field shootings involve use-of-force by officers during arrests or other operations — the supplied sources make that distinction but do not connect the 56 detention deaths to shootings in the field ^[4].

3. Official silence and reporting gaps make direct historical counts difficult

News analysis in the dataset notes that DHS and ICE have provided limited public counts of agent-involved shootings across administrations, making comparisons over time difficult; PBS reported that the agency did not provide numbers for shootings in several administrations when asked, which complicates claims about whether shootings were more or less frequent under Obama ^[3]. The available sources therefore leave a factual gap: the provided corpus lacks an authoritative list of field shootings by ICE during the Obama years.

4. Why present coverage foregrounds 2026 and political narratives

The contemporary, high-profile 2026 shootings prompted intense political reactions—former presidents, governors, mayors and advocacy groups weighed in—and that generates much of the media attention in these documents ^{[5] [6] [8]}. Some reporting and commentaries explicitly frame the incidents as connected to new enforcement directives and staffing changes under the current administration, a framing challenged by critics who point to longstanding problems in detention and enforcement ^{[9] [3]}. Those political dynamics shape which incidents get amplified in the press and which historical patterns are examined.

5. What can and cannot be concluded from these sources

From the supplied reporting it can be concluded that agent-involved shootings dominated headlines in January 2026 and that deaths in ICE custody were documented during the Obama administration ^{[1] [2] [4]}. What cannot be concluded from these sources is whether and how many ICE agents shot people in the field during Obama’s presidency: the assembled documents do not provide a contemporaneous, sourced list or count of such incidents from the Obama years, and they note agency non-responsiveness to queries about comparative numbers ^{[3] [4]}.

6. Where readers should look next to close the gap

To answer definitively whether ICE agents shot people during the Obama administration, and how many times, requires consulting primary compilations and databases (agency use-of-force reports, DOJ investigations, contemporaneous reporting archives, academic studies and compilations such as investigative timelines or Freedom of Information Act releases) — sources not included in the set provided here. The current coverage warns against conflating detention deaths with field shootings and highlights that political framing affects which events are tallied and discussed publicly ^{[4] [3] [8]}.