How many individuals were deported that were legal US citizens in 2025?
Executive summary
There is no authoritative, publicly reported total for how many legal U.S. citizens were deported in 2025; the available reporting documents individual, high-profile mistaken removals and describes large deportation totals for noncitizens, but does not publish a verified count of citizens wrongfully deported [1] [2] [3]. Government removal tallies and independent estimates focus on noncitizen removals and orders, while investigative pieces and court filings record only isolated errors — not a comprehensive figure [4] [5] [1].
1. What the official numbers actually count: noncitizens, not citizens
Federal statistics and public reporting make clear that routine ICE and DHS deportation metrics are meant to track removals of noncitizens and removal orders issued by immigration judges or ERO actions, not the removal of lawful U.S. citizens; ICE’s public statistics organize arrests and detentions by country of citizenship and criminal history categories, which implies the system is built to distinguish citizens from noncitizens but does not routinely release a nationwide “citizens mistakenly deported” total in the cited sources [3]. Migration Policy Institute and TRAC analyses aggregate hundreds of thousands of deportations and removal orders for FY2025, but those counts are described as noncitizen removals and orders, not an accounting of U.S. citizens mistakenly removed [5] [4].
2. High-profile mistakes exist, but they are documented case-by-case, not as a national tally
Reporting highlights specific mistaken removals — for example, coverage of a March 15, 2025 removal of Kilmar Armando Abrego García, described as an administrative error by the government and later the subject of court action to return him to the U.S. — but that case involved a person with withholding of removal status rather than a declared U.S. citizen, and the sources use it to illustrate operational error rather than establish a systemic citizen-deportation count [1]. Investigations and state-level document disclosures — such as emails obtained by CalMatters showing communication between prisons and ICE that sometimes concern U.S. citizens — suggest erroneous targeting and wrongful detentions can occur, yet the reporting does not convert those signals into a verified national number of citizens deported [6].
3. Large removal totals are publicly trumpeted, but they refer to noncitizens and self-deportations
DHS and White House releases in 2025 emphasize record-breaking numbers — statements that more than 500,000 or 605,000 removals occurred and that over 2 million people have left the U.S. through removals or voluntary departures — but those communications are framed as removals of “illegal aliens” or migrants and do not claim to include lawfully recognized U.S. citizens among the counted removals; independent trackers like The Guardian and MPI similarly report hundreds of thousands of deportations in FY2025, again in the context of noncitizen enforcement [7] [8] [2] [5] [9].
4. Why a precise national figure for citizens deported is absent from reporting
None of the supplied sources contains a consolidated, verified national count of legal U.S. citizens who were actually deported in 2025; government releases and watchdog analyses present totals for removals, detentions, and removal orders that target noncitizens, and investigative pieces surface individual wrongful-removal cases without producing a comprehensive statistic [3] [4] [1]. When press and researchers have found wrongful actions they document them case-by-case; absent an agency disclosure or a specific published audit, a reliable aggregate number of citizens removed does not appear in the provided record [6].
5. Bottom line and reporting gap
Based on the available reporting, it is not possible to state a verified number of legal U.S. citizens deported in 2025; the record shows broad enforcement activity and some documented administrative errors, but no source among those provided offers a definitive national count of citizens wrongfully deported — a gap that would require either an ICE/DHS accounting or an independent audit compiling documented mistaken removals [2] [5] [1] [3].