How many ICE detainees are U.S. citizens, and how are they identified in ICE datasets?
Executive summary
Available federal and third‑party reviews show that at least some people whom ICE arrested or detained in recent years were U.S. citizens, but public ICE datasets do not publish a clean, authoritative count of “ICE detainees who are U.S. citizens,” and agency systems and reporting practices make such a count difficult to produce from released files [1] [2] [3]. ICE’s public statistics and underlying Enforcement Integrated Database (EID) record citizenship fields and country‑of‑citizenship variables, while oversight reports and data projects document gaps, inconsistent updates, and technical obstacles to reliably identifying U.S. citizens inside ICE data [4] [5] [1] [3].
1. How many ICE detainees are U.S. citizens — the evidence and the limits
Audits and public datasets show that U.S. citizens have been arrested and detained in some ICE or CBP encounters in recent years, but they stop short of producing a definitive, up‑to‑the‑person total for the agency’s detention population; the Government Accountability Office found “some U.S. citizens” were mistakenly identified and recommended better tracking, and the Deportation Data Project and FOIA releases document individual encounters but not a single reconciled national count that is publicly verified [1] [2] [3]. ICE’s own statistics portal publishes arrests, detention and removal metrics and asserts the integrity of its posted data, but the agency cautions datasets “fluctuate until ‘locked’ at the conclusion of the fiscal year” and does not release a validated, de‑duplicated national tally of citizens detained after data reconciliation for errors or citizenship investigations [4]. Therefore, the factual answer supported by the public record is: some U.S. citizens have been detained by ICE/CBP, but publicly released ICE datasets and oversight reports do not provide a single, authoritative numeric total that can be cited with confidence [1] [2] [4].
2. How ICE datasets identify citizenship and related markers
ICE records citizenship primarily through structured fields in its enforcement datasets — e.g., “citizenship country,” “birth country,” and related citizenship fields in the EID and the agency’s arrests/detentions tables — and these are the variables researchers use to flag U.S. citizens in the data extracts that have been shared publicly or obtained through FOIA [5] [3]. ICE’s EID and derived tools (EAGLE, EDDIE) ingest biometric and biographical data — fingerprints, names, dates of birth, and identity documents — and link to other DHS and law‑enforcement repositories to establish identity, while ICE’s public tables include explicit country‑of‑citizenship values that researchers compare to “United States” or “USA” labels to identify citizens in the files [5] [3]. Advocates and legal groups also note that people can present state IDs or Tribal IDs to assert U.S. citizenship in encounters, and that ICE sometimes relies on DMVs, biometrics, and database searches when investigating citizenship [6] [7].
3. Why the datasets can misstate citizenship: policy and technical gaps
Oversight findings and documentation warn that ICE does not always update citizenship fields after an officer discovers evidence a person may be a U.S. citizen, and guidance across ICE/CBP is uneven — gaps that produce persistent uncertainty when analysts try to count citizens in enforcement records [1]. The Deportation Data Project and ICE documentation emphasize that datasets sometimes use different unique identifiers, require careful merges, and have changed formats across releases, meaning merges across arrests, detentions and removals can omit or duplicate records unless handled carefully [2] [3]. Separately, rising use of biometric linkages, DMV photo searches and commercial data fusion increases the chances of misidentification and privacy spillover for citizens whose records are in source systems, a risk flagged by advocates and reporting on ICE’s surveillance procurement [7] [8] [9].
4. Competing claims, institutional posture, and the accountability gap
ICE’s public posture is that its published datasets are authoritative for enforcement metrics and that ERO is tasked with identifying removable noncitizens, but watchdogs have repeatedly documented procedural failures in citizenship investigations and recommended stronger tracking and data fixes to prevent wrongful detention of citizens [10] [4] [1]. Civil‑society researchers and data projects have improved transparency by posting FOIA‑obtained extracts and codebooks, yet they also flag technical constraints that prevent producing a single verified national count from available public files [2] [3]. The hidden policy trade‑offs are clear: expanding biometric and database access can reduce some identification errors but also increases false matches and privacy harms for U.S. citizens when governance and data‑quality controls are weak [7] [8] [9].