How many U.S. citizens were arrested in ICE raids in 2018 vs 2023?

Executive Summary — Short Answer Up Front

The available documents do not provide a direct, apples‑to‑apples count of how many U.S. citizens were arrested in ICE raids in 2018 versus 2023. ICE’s FY2023 report gives aggregate arrest totals for that fiscal year, and investigative reporting and advocacy pieces document hundreds to thousands of mistaken citizen arrests across multi‑year periods, but none of the provided sources quantify citizens arrested specifically in 2018 and in 2023 in a directly comparable way ^{[1] [2] [3]}. The bottom line: the claim cannot be confirmed or disproved with the supplied material because the datasets required — year‑by‑year breakdowns of arrests by U.S. citizenship status — are not present in these sources ^{[1] [2] [4]}.

1. Missing the Crucial Metric — “Citizenship” Is Not Tracked Publicly in These Reports

ICE’s FY2023 Annual Report lists 170,590 administrative arrests by Enforcement and Removal Operations and other large enforcement totals for FY2023, but it does not break those figures down by U.S. citizenship status in the material provided here, so it cannot answer how many arrestees were U.S. citizens in 2023 ^[1]. Independent reporting and reviews cited in 2018 and later document systematic problems — incomplete records, data errors, and investigatory lapses — that led to hundreds or thousands of mistaken citizen arrests across multi‑year spans, but those accounts aggregate incidents or cover multi‑year periods rather than reporting single‑year citizen arrest totals for 2018 or 2023 ^{[2] [5]}.

2. What the 2018‑Era Reporting Shows — High Profile Raids and Systemic Mistakes

News coverage from 2018 documented large workplace raids and enforcement sweeps that resulted in many arrests, such as an Ohio raid with 146 people arrested, but those reports typically do not state how many of those specific detainees were U.S. citizens ^[6]. Contemporaneous investigations and data reviews produced by reporters and researchers found that since 2012 ICE had released approximately 1,480 people from custody after investigations established U.S. citizenship, and other reviews identified additional cases; these findings illustrate a pattern of wrongful or mistaken detentions but do not give a single‑year citizen arrest count for 2018 ^{[2] [5]}.

3. FY2023 Context — Large Total Arrests, Not Citizenship Breakdown

ICE’s FY2023 summary documents a year of elevated enforcement activity with ERO making 170,590 administrative arrests and removals rising sharply, but it similarly lacks a public breakdown isolating U.S. citizens among those arrestees ^[1]. Other federal agency reporting in the 2020–2022 window shows that 555 U.S. citizens were held in CBP custody for more than 24 hours during a two‑year period, illustrating that customs and border custody data can identify citizen detentions, but that dataset is not the same as ICE‑ERO administrative arrests and covers different timeframes and circumstances ^[4]. Thus FY2023’s high arrest totals do not translate into a known number of citizen arrests from the documents provided.

4. Alternative Indicators and Historical Pattern Evidence

Advocacy and research documents from the 2016–2018 period show a sharp rise in ICE interior encounters and in the number of people flagged as U.S. citizens during contacts — for example, encounters of people identified as citizens rose to tens of thousands in early Trump‑era years — signaling the potential for substantial citizen detentions during aggressive enforcement campaigns, but these are encounters or aggregated citizen contacts rather than validated, single‑year arrest counts for 2018 ^[3]. Post‑2018 reporting continues to document wrongful detentions and evolving enforcement priorities, but the supplied materials stop short of delivering a validated 2018 vs 2023 citizen‑arrest comparison ^{[7] [8]}.

5. Conclusion and What’s Needed to Resolve the Question

To answer “How many U.S. citizens were arrested in ICE raids in 2018 vs 2023?” requires a year‑by‑year dataset that tags each ICE administrative arrest by citizenship status (U.S. citizen vs noncitizen). The provided sources offer important context — large aggregate arrest counts for FY2023, documented multi‑year totals of mistaken citizen detentions since 2012, and evidence of increased encounters in 2016–2018 — but they do not supply the specific per‑year citizen arrest figures for 2018 or 2023 needed to make a direct comparison ^{[1] [2] [3]}. A definitive answer would require targeted ICE/ERO statistics or FOIA‑released internal records that explicitly report citizenship for each arrest by calendar year.