How many ICE detainees are U.S. citizens.
Executive summary
Official U.S. government data do not provide a reliable, single-number answer to how many people held by ICE are U.S. citizens; independent investigations and news compilations put the count of documented citizen detentions in the low hundreds, while ICE/DHS insist their operations are not detaining citizens as a matter of policy [1] [2] [3]. What can be said with confidence is that citizen detentions occur, are documented in media and investigative databases, but are not centrally tracked by the government in a way that yields a comprehensive statistic [1] [2].
1. Official silence and data gaps
ICE and DHS public statistics catalogue arrests, removals and detention populations by nationality and criminal history but do not publish a definitive tally of detained U.S. citizens, and multiple reporting projects have concluded the federal government does not systematically track “citizen detentions” in a way that produces a single authoritative number [4] [1]. That lack of an official count is the central reason why the question cannot be answered with a single government-sourced figure; ICE’s public dashboards focus on noncitizen populations and categories such as country of citizenship rather than a validated count of mistakenly or temporarily detained U.S. citizens [4].
2. What independent reporting has found
Investigative reporters and non‑profits who compiled case-by-case records have documented more than a hundred instances of U.S. citizens being detained or held by immigration agents: ProPublica and regional outlets collected and reviewed hundreds of cases and OPB reported “more than 170” U.S. citizens held by immigration agents in the period they examined [2] [1]. These figures reflect compiled, documented incidents—often where lawyers, family members or on‑camera footage confirmed a citizen was held—rather than a comprehensive census of all interactions between ICE and the public [2].
3. Recent, high‑profile examples that illustrate the problem
Recent high-profile cases in Minnesota and elsewhere show the phenomenon is neither purely historical nor theoretical: multiple news outlets described incidents in which U.S. citizens were grabbed, restrained or taken to ICE facilities during enforcement operations in Minneapolis and Richfield, including two Target employees and other local residents who said they were held and later released [5] [6] [7]. These reporting threads also document how families and advocates sometimes must obtain court orders or legal intervention to secure release, underscoring the procedural harm even when detention is later acknowledged as erroneous [6] [8].
4. Government pushback and competing narratives
The Department of Homeland Security has publicly pushed back against reporting that it detains or deports citizens, asserting enforcement operations are “highly targeted” and that agents are trained to confirm status so that U.S. citizens are not arrested or detained in immigration operations [3]. That statement represents the official position and must be weighed against the documented case compilations and video‑recorded incidents compiled by journalists and advocacy groups, which show multiple occasions where citizens were held—sometimes violently—before release or clarification [3] [2] [5].
5. Bottom line and limits of available evidence
There is no authoritative government number for “how many ICE detainees are U.S. citizens”; independent compilations find documented citizen detentions in the low hundreds (for example, “more than 170” in one ProPublica/OPB compilation), while ICE/DHS maintain such detentions are not an outcome of their targeted enforcement [2] [3] [1]. Because the federal agencies do not produce a single, validated count and data collection is fragmented, any reported totals should be read as minimum, case‑based tallies rather than comprehensive totals—and continued reporting, FOIA requests, or policy changes would be required to produce a definitive official figure [1] [2] [4].