How many confirmed shootings involving ICE or CBP occurred between 2009 and 2017, according to agency records and independent investigations?
Executive summary
A precise, agency-confirmed tally of shootings involving U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) between 2009 and 2017 cannot be produced from the reporting supplied: the documents provided do not include a definitive count for that period, and multiple sources note that ICE/CBP do not publicly maintain clear, centralized disclosures of all deadly-force incidents [1] [2] [3]. Independent trackers and news investigations focus heavily on later spikes and on opaque agency record-keeping, undercutting any attempt to state a confirmed number for 2009–2017 based on these sources [4] [5].
1. What the available sources actually cover—recent spikes and chronic opacity
The material provided centers on recent surges in immigration‑agency shootings and the difficulty of holding agencies accountable, not on a historical inventory stretching back to 2009; outlets from The Trace to The Guardian and PBS document multiple shootings and deaths in 2025–2026 and describe how ICE and CBP do not fully disclose violent incidents, which complicates historical accounting [1] [6] [7]. CBP’s own public “assault and use of force” statistics exist but are framed as incident counts and do not equate directly to a labeled, year‑by‑year list of “shootings” attributable to ICE vs. CBP for 2009–2017, and the agency’s metrics explicitly aggregate varying events into single incidents [2]. Independent trackers and data teams cited in the supplied reporting have concentrated their count efforts on the Trump administration’s redeployments and the 2025–2026 period, producing widely cited tallies for those years rather than for 2009–2017 [4] [5].
2. Why a clean 2009–2017 number is missing from the supplied reporting
Several of the sources emphasize agency secrecy, inconsistent documentation, and fragmentation between DHS components—Border Patrol (part of CBP), ICE, and HSI—so that even public investigations struggle to attribute a shooting to a single agency without internal records or independent probes [1] [8]. Reuters and BBC reporting show how competing official narratives and limited disclosure can obscure whether an incident was ICE, CBP (Border Patrol), or involved both—compounding retrospective counts for earlier years [9] [10]. Given those constraints, the supplied corpus does not present an authoritative, corroborated count for the 2009–2017 window.
3. What independent investigators and journalists have done—and their limits
Investigative outlets have assembled running counts and case lists—The Trace, The Washington Post, data teams and nonprofits have catalogued dozens of FBI or local investigations in some recent periods—but those efforts are described in the supplied reports as focused on contemporary surges and are explicitly partial because the agencies themselves do not publish comprehensive incident-level histories [5] [4] [1]. PBS’s reporting on individual investigations underscores that internal reviews and notifications to Congress happen, but that these reviews are episodic and not necessarily consolidated into a public historical archive that would allow a researcher to say, with source-backed precision, “X confirmed shootings occurred from 2009–2017” [7].
4. Bottom line and what would be required to answer definitively
Based solely on the supplied sources, there is no agency‑published, independently verified count of confirmed ICE‑ or CBP‑involved shootings for 2009–2017; the materials instead document opacity, fragmented reporting, and more recent tallies from 2025–2026 [2] [1] [4]. A definitive answer would require obtaining contemporaneous DHS/ICE/CBP incident logs or validated third‑party databases covering 2009–2017—records not present in the provided reporting—or a Freedom of Information Act release or consolidated DHS briefing that enumerates confirmed shootings in that exact timeframe.