How many American citizens have been wrongly detained by ICE in 2025?
Executive summary
ProPublica’s investigative tally — compiled and reported by outlets including OPB and cited by legal blogs — identifies “more than 170” U.S. citizens who were held by immigration agents in 2025 [1] [2] [3]. That figure is the best publicly available count of documented citizen detentions in 2025, but it is an investigative total, not an official ICE or DHS statistic, and federal agencies dispute or decline to produce an independent aggregated count [4] [5].
1. What the public tally shows: an investigative count of 170+ citizen detentions
A cross‑checked review by ProPublica, reported by Oregon Public Broadcasting, compiled and verified every case its reporters could find of agents holding U.S. citizens against their will in 2025, concluding the number exceeded 170 — a figure that has been cited repeatedly by law firms and advocacy groups tracking wrongful detentions [1] [2] [3] [6].
2. Why that number is not an official ICE total
ICE’s public statistics release operational totals on arrests, removals and detention populations but do not publish a straightforward, audited count of “wrongful detentions” of U.S. citizens; ICE’s datasets focus on people in custody by country of citizenship and other operational categories and are subject to revision and limitations at fiscal year lock [5]. Because ICE’s published data do not explicitly enumerate confirmed errors like misdetentions of citizens, the investigative 170+ figure remains an external tally rather than an agency‑verified metric [5].
3. Federal pushback and the politics of counting
The Department of Homeland Security has publicly disputed reporting in some high‑profile cases — issuing statements that DHS “does not deport U.S. citizens” and characterizing particular stories as false or incomplete — underscoring an institutional refusal in some instances to accept investigative tallies as definitive [4]. A House and Senate interest in these incidents is evident in oversight documents and subcommittee inquiries that reference detained U.S. citizens and contestations of official claims, showing the issue has become both legal and political [7].
4. Context: broader enforcement surge complicates verification
Independent datasets and reporting show ICE detention totals and arrest patterns skyrocketed in 2025, with point‑in‑time detention counts and surge operations amplifying the risk of collateral citizen detentions; outlets tracking ICE counts reported record detention populations and data releases that document massive increases in community arrests, which investigators say created the environment for the documented citizen holds [8] [9] [10] [11]. Those broad operational shifts increase both the number of encounters and the chances that errors — from database mismatches to “collateral sweeps” — will occur, a dynamic ProPublica’s tally aims to capture even if it cannot be confirmed against a single official register [2] [10].
5. Bottom line and limits of the reporting
The accurate, independently verifiable answer available in public reporting is that investigative journalists have documented and compiled “more than 170” cases of U.S. citizens being held by immigration agents in 2025, but that figure should be read as a conservative investigative total rather than an official count because ICE and DHS either do not produce or dispute a reconciled public figure; moreover, ICE’s administrative datasets and point‑in‑time totals confirm a vastly expanded enforcement footprint in 2025 but do not provide a clear, agency‑certified tally of wrongful citizen detentions to validate or refute the 170+ number [1] [2] [5] [8] [4].