How many people were shot by ICE or CBP officers during the Obama administration, according to DHS or DOJ records?
Executive summary
The sources provided do not contain a DHS or DOJ tally of how many people were shot by ICE or CBP officers during the Obama administration, so a definitive number cannot be produced from this material; contemporary reporting and investigations cited here focus largely on more recent years and on problems with DHS recordkeeping that make retrospective counts difficult [1] [2]. Independent trackers and news outlets have published incident lists for later periods, but those lists use differing methodologies and generally cover the Trump-era surge rather than the Obama years [3] [1].
1. What the public reporting covers — mostly recent spikes, not Obama’s era
Major news outlets and aggregators in the provided set concentrate on shootings that occurred during the 2024–2026 spike in federal immigration enforcement, compiling incident lists and case narratives for that later period rather than producing a comprehensive historical DHS/DOJ count for 2009–2017 [1] [4] [5].
2. Why an authoritative DHS/DOJ count is hard to find in these sources
Investigative reporting and oversight pieces compiled here document systemic problems with DHS recordkeeping and inconsistent reporting practices — factors that obscure a clean historical total; the Trace’s review and referenced government audits found that inadequate data collection and aggregation practices sometimes hid use-of-force incidents from DHS oversight [2].
3. Different projects use different definitions and methods
Where independent outlets (for example NBC’s list) offer numeric tallies, they explicitly limit their scope — for instance, counting only incidents in which an on-duty ICE or CBP officer fired at and struck someone, and excluding shots that missed or were non‑lethal projectiles — which means such tallies are not interchangeable with an official DHS/DOJ statistic unless the government used identical criteria [1].
4. Oversight bodies and public data that could yield an answer (but are not in these sources)
The most direct place an authoritative number would come from is DHS or DOJ use-of-force or civil‑rights investigation records, or OIG/GAO audits of those databases; the materials supplied do not include such a DHS/DOJ retrospective for the Obama administration, so the required official count is absent from this set [2].
5. Alternative perspectives and implicit agendas in available reporting
Civil‑liberties groups and local advocates emphasize that undercounting is likely because of the recordkeeping flaws and limited internal disciplinary authority, arguing that official tallies understate harms; at the same time, government statements in recent incidents often present self-defense narratives, and some outlets reproduce those accounts while noting later video or records that complicate them — illustrating competing agendas between oversight advocates and agency communications [2] [6] [7].
6. What can be responsibly concluded from the provided material
Based strictly on the sources given, it is not possible to state “how many people were shot by ICE or CBP officers during the Obama administration according to DHS or DOJ records” because the necessary DHS/DOJ historical figures or publications are not included here, and investigative reporting warns that DHS recordkeeping has at times failed to capture the full number of use‑of‑force incidents [2] [1]. Any attempt to provide a precise Obama‑era count would require consulting DHS/DOJ archived use‑of‑force databases, OIG/GAO audits that cover 2009–2017, or contemporary DOJ civil‑rights investigation records not present among the supplied documents.