How many U.S. citizens have been deported by ICE since 2020

1. What the best available audits say about mistaken deportations through 2020

A GAO review — repeatedly cited by advocacy groups and reporting — concluded that up to 70 potential U.S. citizens were deported by ICE during the period the audit covered (through 2020), and that ICE and CBP maintain incomplete records that likely undercount such errors ^{[1] [2]}. TRAC and other researchers have also documented thousands of cases in which U.S. citizens were wrongly flagged as removable over longer time frames (for example, TRAC identified 2,840 U.S. citizens named as potentially eligible for removal from 2002–2017), underscoring that mistaken identification is a recurring, documented problem even if the confirmed deportation count is smaller ^{[1] [2]}.

2. Why a simple post‑2020 tally cannot be produced from public ICE/DHS data

ICE’s public statistics and DHS press releases focus on aggregate removals and country‑of‑citizenship breakdowns for noncitizens and do not provide a standing, transparent metric for confirmed deportations of U.S. citizens; contemporary two‑week ICE reporting tracked by outlets like The Guardian records removals and detentions but does not isolate U.S. citizens as a deportation category for the post‑2020 period ^{[3] [4]}. Independent reporting and watchdogs repeatedly note that ICE’s data systems and recordkeeping have gaps and that the agency’s public dashboards are not structured to answer the specific question of how many U.S. citizens have been removed since 2020 ^{[1] [2]}.

3. What happened after 2020 in related enforcement metrics — but not a citizen count

From 2020 onward, DHS and analysts report surges in enforcement activity and large totals of removals and flights; DHS and advocacy trackers report hundreds of thousands of deportations and millions of departures in recent years, but these headline totals are for noncitizens broadly and cannot be used to infer the number of mistakenly deported U.S. citizens ^{[5] [6] [7] [8]}. Migration Policy and TRAC publish detailed removal and detention statistics (for example, ICE’s share of annual deportations and average yearly removal counts), yet those sources explicitly discuss removals of noncitizens and do not supply a post‑2020 count of U.S. citizens removed ^{[9] [10]}.

4. Competing narratives, incentives and what that means for the record

Advocacy groups and watchdogs emphasize systemic failures and point to the GAO’s up‑to‑70 finding as proof of dangerous administrative error; ICE and DHS focus public messaging on total removals of noncitizens and on enforcement milestones, which can create a perception gap between error‑tracking advocates and agency dashboards ^{[2] [5]}. Some political actors driving enforcement statistics may have incentives to tout large aggregate removal numbers without documenting errors against citizens, while advocacy organizations have incentives to highlight individual wrongful deportation cases to press for reform — both perspectives are supported by the public documents available, but neither supplies a definitive post‑2020 citizen deportation number ^{[6] [2]}.

5. Bottom line and next steps for anyone seeking a precise answer

No source in the public record provided here contains a verifiable count of how many U.S. citizens ICE deported since 2020; the most authoritative audited figure available covers only up to 2020 (GAO: up to 70 deportations) and researchers warn that incomplete records make even that a potential undercount ^{[1] [2]}. Determining a definitive post‑2020 number would require either an updated GAO or Inspector General audit, or release of ICE/CBP case‑level removal records with citizenship verification — none of which appear in the sources provided ^{[1] [3]}.