How many fatal use-of-force incidents by ICE agents have been documented since 2003, by year?
Executive summary
Available reporting documents numerous fatal use-of-force incidents involving federal immigration officers, including ICE, but the provided sources do not contain a single, public, authoritative year-by-year tabulation of fatal ICE use-of-force incidents from 2003 to the present , so a precise annual breakdown cannot be produced from these materials alone [1] [2] [3]. Investigations and compilations by outlets such as The Trace, The Marshall Project and major news organisations show clusters of deaths in certain years (notably recent years tied to 2025–2026 operations), but the record is incomplete and often redacted or scattered across reportage [1] [4] [5].
1. What the best investigations have documented — but not tallied annually
The first comprehensive journalistic compilation of ICE shootings, produced by The Trace in collaboration with partners, assembled agency use-of-force logs and identified multiple shooting incidents across the country, including some that resulted in deaths, but those logs were redacted, sparse on narrative detail, and not presented as a year-by-year fatality table spanning 2003–2026 in the publicly published piece [1]. Subsequent reporting in late 2025 and January 2026—tracking a sharp rise in interior enforcement and vehicle-related shootings—catalogued at least a dozen or more shootings in months-long windows and several confirmed fatalities, but again those counts are episodic rather than a continuous historical series [6] [5].
2. Recent spike and documented deaths in 2025–2026
Multiple outlets documented a surge in shootings by immigration agents after the January 2025 change in administration policy, with The Trace and others counting numerous incidents since mid-2025 and noting that immigration agents opened fire at least 16 times in a recent window tied to the enforcement surge, with several resulting deaths [2] [5]. News organizations reported specific fatal cases in early 2026—Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti among them—and aggregated counts that included both in-custody deaths and fatal shootings by on- and off-duty agents, with Al Jazeera noting at least six custody deaths and a seventh fatal shooting by an off-duty ICE officer in early 2026 [3] [7].
3. Why a year-by-year fatality list is not reproducible from these sources
The reporting repeatedly emphasizes gaps: ICE’s use-of-force logs are incomplete and heavily redacted; the agency resists disclosing narrative details and names; and many counts reported by journalists cover limited windows or mix CBP and ICE incidents without always disaggregating agency responsibility, making a clean annual breakdown from 2003 onward impossible from the provided materials alone [1] [6]. Independent tallies exist for recent years (e.g., post‑January 2025 compilations) but no source in the set publishes a verified, continuous, year-by-year fatal-use-of-force dataset for ICE dating back to 2003 [1] [5].
4. What can be reliably stated from the material at hand
It is verifiable that investigative reporting has uncovered previously unpublicised ICE shootings including fatal incidents (The Trace’s 2024 investigation) and that there was a concentration of shootings and several fatalities in the period after January 2025 through January 2026, widely reported by outlets including The Guardian, Time, PBS, NPR and The Marshall Project [1] [2] [5] [8] [4]. It is also verifiable that agency records are not fully transparent: ICE redactions and refusal to release complete use-of-force reports are repeatedly documented, which explains why journalists cannot produce a definitive annual tally from 2003–2026 using only public records cited here [1].
5. Path to an authoritative year-by-year count
To assemble the requested year-by-year fatality table would require access to unredacted ICE/DHS use-of-force records or a consolidated dataset compiled and released by a government watchdog, academic researcher, or a nonprofit that has secured full records via FOIA and verified agency attribution (the reporting recommends FOIA litigation and congressional disclosure) — neither of which appears as a completed, public resource in the sources provided [1] [5]. Until such a dataset is produced, any numeric year-by-year answer would be speculative beyond the episodic counts and cases documented in the cited reporting.