How often does ICE detain Native American individuals compared to other groups?
Executive summary
Available reporting does not produce a precise, comparable rate showing how often ICE detains Native American individuals versus other groups; datasets and agency reporting make it difficult to count U.S.-born tribal citizens in ICE’s immigration detention records and independent accounts instead document recurring incidents of questioning, short-term detentions, and wrongful holds that tribal leaders and rights groups say are meaningful and harmful [1] [2] [3]. Separately, Native people face high rates of criminal incarceration in jails and prisons, a different system that complicates any direct apples‑to‑apples comparison with ICE civil immigration detention [4].
1. Data gaps and why a clean comparison is impossible
ICE’s public statistics and searchable detainee records do not permit straightforward identification of U.S.-born Native Americans — for example the inability to select “United States” as a birth country in the detainee search and structural limits in FOIA datasets mean detentions of citizens can be effectively invisible in immigration detention tallies, and Vera’s detention dashboard had to reconstruct individual detention histories from fragmented FOIA datasets because ICE’s public data are incomplete [1] [2].
2. What agency data do show about overall detention patterns
ICE and enforcement statistics emphasize that most people in ICE custody are transfers from CBP following border arrests and that mandatory detention applies to certain noncitizen categories, but those official narratives and categories are about noncitizens and do not map onto U.S.-born Native citizens — hence ICE’s own framework limits its usefulness for counting Indigenous citizens allegedly detained in immigration sweeps [5] [2].
3. Independent reporting: repeated incidents, often short-term, across regions
News organizations and tribal leaders have reported multiple episodes in 2024–2025 where dozens of Native people were questioned or briefly detained, including reports from the Navajo Nation, Minneapolis, Texas and Oregon, and tribal attorneys working to secure releases — these accounts document harms and community fear even if they do not establish a national detention rate comparable to other racial groups [6] [7] [1] [8].
4. Legal and rights context: citizens, tribal IDs, and claims of wrongful targeting
Legal resources from the Native American Rights Fund stress that Native Americans born in the United States are U.S. citizens and thus not subject to immigration detention or deportation, yet NARF and others report ICE actions that disregard tribal status or tribal identification and have produced guidance for nonprofits and tribal members to resist unlawful detentions and to document incidents [9] [3].
5. Criminal justice overrepresentation complicates interpretation
Separation of systems matters: American Indian and Alaska Native people are shown in criminal‑justice data to have high incarceration rates in local jails and prisons relative to other racial groups, which creates intersections where tribal members may be more exposed to detention generally even if immigration detention of citizens remains legally impermissible — the high baseline of criminal incarceration makes any overlapping enforcement activity harder to disentangle without better data [4].
6. Accountability, advocacy, and political tensions shaping the record
Advocates, tribal governments, and some senators have raised concerns about ICE operations on tribal lands and requested consultations; at the same time, there are complex political and economic dynamics — for example Native entities have been involved in federal detention contracts — that can create conflicting incentives and obscure how deterrence, enforcement, and profit motives shape who is detained and why [10] [11] [12].
7. Bottom line: frequency compared to other groups and what can be concluded
There is credible, repeated reporting of Native people being questioned and sometimes held by ICE, and strong claims from tribal leaders and rights groups that such incidents are occurring and are undercounted, but there is no reliable national metric in the public record to show how often ICE detains Native Americans relative to other racial or national groups; the best-supported conclusion is that documented incidents are significant in community impact but cannot be quantified as a comparative detention rate with current ICE data and FOIA-derived datasets [1] [2] [6] [3].