Does ICE collect or publish race/ethnicity data that could identify Native Americans in detention records?
Executive summary
ICE maintains and records some race and ethnicity fields in its detention records, but those fields are unevenly collected, inconsistently coded, and not regularly published in a way that would reliably identify enrolled Native American tribal citizens; advocacy groups and researchers have documented gaps and misclassification, while tribes and news outlets report that ICE has not shared tribal-identifying information when asked [1] [2] [3]. In short: ICE does collect racial/ethnic data in detention systems, but the data’s incompleteness, apparent manipulation or misclassification, and agency opacity mean it generally cannot be relied on to identify Native Americans in publicly available detention records [1] [2] [4].
1. What the records say — ICE records include race/ethnicity fields but are patchy
Investigations by immigration researchers and advocacy groups have found that ICE and partner detention facilities maintain race and ethnicity fields, yet those fields are often incomplete or misrecorded, producing “drastic gaps” in record-keeping at specific facilities and making public analysis of who is detained by race or ethnicity difficult [1]. The American Immigration Council’s analysis flagged that some sites simply left race/ethnicity blank or assigned inconsistent categories, undermining any reliable inference about the presence of Native Americans in published datasets [1].
2. Misclassification and opaque practices undermine identification
Advocacy groups have accused ICE of intentionally manipulating or “whitewashing” racial data to avoid scrutiny, and Freedom of Information Act documents uncovered by researchers show concrete examples of misclassification—such as people from predominantly Black countries being coded as “white”—which illustrates how racial coding can be distorted in immigration databases and warns that Native American identities could likewise be obscured by miscoding or omission [2]. Those findings suggest that even when a race field exists, it may not reflect individuals’ self-identity or tribal enrollment in a way that would permit identification [2].
3. Tribes report ICE refused tribal-identifying information when requested
Multiple news reports show tribal leaders saying ICE or DHS provided only limited information—sometimes only first names—about enrolled tribal citizens in custody and would withhold further identifying details unless the tribe entered into a formal agreement with ICE, a response tribes described as unacceptable and a barrier to verifying whether tribal members were being detained [3] [5]. The Oglala Sioux Tribe publicly demanded release and access to information about enrolled members after being told they could only get more through a government-to-government arrangement or agreement with ICE [3] [6].
4. ICE’s operational claims and tribal ID guidance complicate the picture
ICE and DHS statements cited in reporting maintain that agents are trained to accept tribal IDs as proof of citizenship and that ICE cannot place U.S. citizens in immigration detention once citizenship is verified, positioning the agency as acknowledging tribal identity while denying systemic targeting [7] [4]. Those official claims sit uneasily alongside tribal reports of members detained and denied fuller identification details from authorities, highlighting a tension between agency practice and tribal experience [4] [3].
5. What this means for identifying Native Americans in public detention data
Because race/ethnicity fields are inconsistently populated, sometimes misclassified, and because ICE does not routinely publish tribal enrollment identifiers or make those identifiers broadly available to tribes or the public, publicly accessible ICE detention records generally do not provide a reliable mechanism to identify Native American tribal citizens in detention [1] [2] [3]. Reporting limitations mean it is not possible from the sources reviewed to assert that ICE never records tribal enrollment internally, but the available evidence shows that whatever internal recording exists is either not transparent, not standardized, or not released in a way that enables external verification [1] [2] [3].
6. Competing narratives and the unanswered questions
Advocacy groups and tribes argue that ICE’s race/ethnicity data practices hide disparities and hinder accountability, pointing to FOIA discoveries and facility-level gaps [2] [1], while DHS and ICE emphasize training on tribal IDs and legal limits on detaining citizens—yet the refusal to share tribal-identifying details when tribes request them has left a factual gap that reporting cannot close without additional agency disclosure or standardized public data [7] [4] [3]. The net effect is transparency failure: collection exists in some form, but publication and reliable identification of Native Americans in ICE public detention records do not.