How many use‑of‑force incidents involving ICE agents have been documented by independent watchdogs since 2024?
Executive summary
Independent watchdog reporting does not offer a single, authoritative tally of ICE use‑of‑force incidents since 2024; available investigative outlets and nonprofits have documented a pattern of repeated forceful encounters and at least “more than a dozen” agent shootings referenced by The Trace and other outlets, but the precise total since 2024 cannot be derived from the sources provided [1] [2] [3].
1. What the watchdogs have counted — fragmentary but alarming
Investigative organizations and watchdogs have produced multiple, overlapping counts and case files: The Trace (and outlets citing its work) has cataloged more than a dozen shootings by ICE or related federal immigration agents in recent reporting and described broad opacity around ICE’s logs [1] [2]; ProPublica and other reporters have separately compiled large numbers of encounters where federal immigration officers detained U.S. citizens or used force during enforcement operations, finding more than 170 detentions in a concentrated period during the 2025 surge in activity [4] [5].
2. Why there is no single, definitive number in the public record
The reason reporting cannot produce a simple post‑2024 count is structural: ICE tightly controls and redacts its use‑of‑force logs and has been found by a federal oversight agency to have failed to thoroughly document use‑of‑force incidents, which leaves independent trackers to reconstruct incidents from court records, FOIA fragments, local police reports and media — a patchwork that reporters explicitly warn is incomplete and uneven [2] [3].
3. Examples that anchor the pattern (but do not equal a census)
Recent, high‑profile investigations and reporting have supplied concrete case totals for specific categories — for example, The Trace and Type/Investigations documented a series of fatal and nonfatal shootings by ICE agents and described investigators’ inability to obtain full supplemental records for many cases [2] [3], while outlets such as The Marshall Project and Just Security highlighted a spate of videorecorded forceful incidents, including the Minneapolis fatal shooting that prompted widespread scrutiny [1] [6].
4. Competing narratives and institutional opacity
ICE and some federal officials frame incidents as lawful, or characterize specific encounters as self‑defense or terrorism responses, while watchdogs and local officials often dispute those claims and call for independent probes; the agencies’ withholding of full use‑of‑force reports fuels divergent narratives and makes independent counts provisional [6] [7].
5. What the sources do and do not support about “how many” since 2024
The provided reporting supports stating that independent watchdogs have documented dozens of forceful encounters and at least “more than a dozen” shootings referenced by The Trace and allied investigations, and that ProPublica documented 170+ detentions during a concentrated enforcement surge — but none of these sources supplies a consolidated, validated numeric total of all ICE use‑of‑force incidents occurring strictly since 2024, so an exact figure cannot be credibly presented from the material at hand [1] [4] [2].
6. Bottom line and what would close the gap
Bottom line: independent watchdogs and investigative outlets have documented a substantial number of use‑of‑force incidents involving ICE agents since 2024 — including multiple shootings and numerous recorded confrontations — but the sources make clear the public record is incomplete and no single watchdog has produced a comprehensive post‑2024 census; obtaining a definitive number would require unredacted ICE use‑of‑force logs or a consolidated dataset released by an independent oversight body or the Department of Homeland Security [2] [3] [7].