How many citizens were actually Deported by ICE in 2025?
Executive summary
Official reporting and agency statements reviewed here show no documented, systematic deportation of U.S. citizens by ICE in 2025; DHS explicitly states ICE “does NOT deport U.S. citizens” [1]. ICE and independent trackers instead document large numbers of removals of non‑citizens in 2025—hundreds of thousands by some counts—but the sources provided contain no verified count of U.S. citizens deported that year [2] [3] [4].
1. What the agencies say: ICE/DHS policy and public denial
The Department of Homeland Security publicly pushed back on reporting that suggested U.S. citizens were being deported, issuing a formal debunk that “ICE does NOT arrest or deport U.S. [citizens]” and arguing the agency vets target lists and asks status‑determining questions during encounters [1]. That official line is definitive in the public record supplied here and establishes the baseline: there is no acknowledged practice or policy of deporting U.S. citizens, and DHS denies the specific allegation directly [1].
2. What the deportation tallies actually measure: mostly non‑citizens
ICE’s own biweekly data releases and aggregated trackers focus on arrests, detentions and removals of migrants and non‑citizens; newsrooms and data projects have used those releases to count hundreds of thousands of removals in 2025, but those outputs are counts of non‑citizen removals, not citizens [2] [3]. Reporting and projects such as The Guardian’s tracker and the Deportation Data Project explicitly source their deportation totals to ICE removals tables and FOIA releases—datasets that are used to document the scale of immigration enforcement, not deportation of citizens [2] [3].
3. Media estimates of total removals do not equate to citizen deportations
High‑profile claims about the volume of removals—ranging in some press accounts to statements of roughly 140,000 by April or nearly 200,000 in seven months—refer to deportations of non‑citizens under the administration’s ramped‑up enforcement, not to U.S. citizens being removed from the country [4]. Independent coverage emphasizes the surge in arrests and removals but also highlights that the vast majority of those processed are non‑citizens and that ICE data are the basis for those counts [2] [4].
4. Mistaken detentions versus formal removals: the evidentiary gap
Reporting documents wrongful detentions and cases where people claim to have been improperly held—issues that feed public alarm—but the sources available here do not produce verified cases of formal deportation (removal) of U.S. citizens in 2025; DHS’s rebuttal and ICE’s release practices mean confirmed citizen removals would be notable and documented, yet none appear in the materials reviewed [1] [2]. That leaves open the possibility of isolated administrative errors, but the provided record contains no verified count of actual citizen removals.
5. Independent trackers and watchdogs: scale, transparency problems, and limits
Watchdog organizations and researchers document huge increases in detentions and removals and warn about data gaps, coding changes, and missing identifiers that complicate tracing individual outcomes—factors that make it difficult for outside analysts to definitively rule in or out rare exceptions such as an isolated citizen removal if it were poorly recorded [3] [5]. These groups emphasize transparency problems in ICE data even while compiling large‑scale counts of deportations of non‑citizens [3] [5].
6. Bottom line and caveats
On the specific question—how many U.S. citizens were actually deported by ICE in 2025—the available public record reviewed here contains no verified instances and DHS explicitly states ICE does not deport citizens, so the documented count in these sources is zero; however, reporting also shows substantial data quality and transparency issues that mean absolute certainty about rare, undocumented anomalies cannot be established from these sources alone [1] [3] [2].