Fact check: How many US citizens or lawful immigrants have been unlawfully detained for 12 or more hours by ICE in 2025?

Executive Summary — Short Answer Up Front: The available reporting and legal filings do not provide a reliable, single-number count of how many U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents were unlawfully detained by ICE for 12 or more hours in 2025. Public legal actions, city permit reviews, national detention statistics, and news accounts document individual wrongful detentions, localized permit violations, systemic increases in detention volume, and court-ordered class definitions tied to 12-hour thresholds, but none of the provided sources produce a comprehensive nationwide tally for 2025 ^{[1] [2] [3] [4]}.

1. Legal settlements and class actions expose patterns — but not a national tally. A recent class-action settlement and related court proceedings forced ICE to change detainer practices and subjected its use of detainers to neutral review, signaling institutional recognition of constitutional risks tied to detentions; however, these documents and filings focus on policies, remedies, and procedures rather than enumerating every individual detained 12+ hours nationwide in 2025. The sources show litigation targeting recurring practices at specific sites and the agency’s procedures for issuing detainers, but they stop short of providing a compiled count of U.S. citizens or lawful immigrants affected across all jurisdictions ^{[1] [5]}.

2. Court orders in New York define a 12-hour class but don’t produce a nationwide headcount. A federal judge provisionally certified a class of people held at Manhattan’s 26 Federal Plaza for 12 hours or longer, and a preliminary injunction mandated facility and spacing improvements, demonstrating that courts are treating 12 hours as a meaningful threshold for constitutional and humane-treatment claims. These orders create a legal framework that could produce site-specific counts through discovery, but the court materials cited are remedies-focused and do not offer a consolidated national number of U.S. citizens or lawful immigrants detained 12+ hours during 2025 ^{[6] [7]}.

3. Local permit enforcement in Portland produced concrete incident counts — limited to that city. Portland’s permitting bureau documented 25 occasions between October 1, 2024, and July 27, 2025, when ICE held people beyond the city’s 12-hour limit, a concrete, local tally tied to permit violations. This provides clear evidence of violations at that location and timeframe, but the finding is jurisdiction-bound and does not extrapolate to ICE’s nationwide operations. The city’s monitoring reflects municipal oversight and a regulatory lens that other localities may not be applying or reporting in the same way ^[3].

4. News reporting shows individual U.S. citizen detentions that highlight systemic risk. Accounts such as the case of Juan Carlos Lopez-Gomez, a U.S. citizen detained in Florida despite presenting proof of citizenship, show individual instances of wrongful detention and underscore practices that can entangle citizens and lawful residents. These reports illuminate procedural failures—misidentification, reliance on detainers, or inadequate verification—that can extend detentions beyond 12 hours, but the articles themselves are case studies rather than statistical audits and do not produce an aggregate 2025 count ^[2].

5. National detention figures show volume but not the specific 12-hour illegal-detention subgroup. Reporting that ICE detained roughly 59,000 immigrants in 2025 signals a substantial increase in enforcement and a larger population exposed to detention risk, yet national detention totals do not identify citizenship status reliably or measure how many people were held unlawfully for 12 or more hours. The 59,000 figure sets context for scale—more detentions logically raise the chance of wrongful or prolonged holds—but it cannot be used to infer a precise number of unlawful 12+ hour detentions of citizens or lawful immigrants without further disaggregated data ^[4].

6. Detention standards and agency rules matter for assessing legality, but they aren’t audit outputs. The 2025 National Detention Standards outline the rules ICE is supposed to follow and establish thresholds and rights relevant to prolonged holding. These standards provide the legal baseline to determine unlawfulness once a specific detention is analyzed, but they are policy texts rather than surveillance or compliance reports; they enable judicial and administrative scrutiny that can produce counts in litigation or audits, yet the standards themselves do not supply the requested 2025 nationwide figure ^[8].

7. What would be needed to produce the precise number — and why it’s missing from these sources. A defensible national count requires systematic, disaggregated data from ICE or comprehensive audits combining facility logs, detainer records, and determinations of citizenship or lawful status, plus legal findings about unlawfulness. The supplied sources include local audits, litigation-driven class definitions, and national detention totals, but none include the cross-referenced, agency-level dataset or court-verified aggregate necessary to state how many U.S. citizens or lawful immigrants were unlawfully detained for 12+ hours in 2025 ^{[3] [6] [4]}.

8. Bottom line for the questioner: available evidence is suggestive, not cumulative. The assembled reporting and legal records establish that wrongful and extended detentions occurred in 2025 at multiple levels—individual miscarriages, local permit violations, and court-identified systemic concerns—but they do not add up to a single, validated national count of U.S. citizens or lawful immigrants unlawfully detained for 12 or more hours. To answer that question definitively would require ICE production of disaggregated detention records or a nationwide audit with legal adjudication, neither of which appears in the provided material ^{[2] [3] [4]}.