How many U.S. citizens have been wrongly detained by ICE each year since 2016?
Executive summary
There is no authoritative, publicly available year-by-year tally of U.S. citizens wrongly detained by ICE since 2016; official ICE datasets and watchdog inquiries document individual cases and limited totals, while journalists and advocacy groups offer conflicting estimates that range from the low dozens to plausibly thousands depending on assumptions and methodology [1] [2] [3] [4]. The sources reviewed show documented clusters of citizen detentions, specific case series, and extrapolations — but they do not produce a clean annual count from 2016–2025 that can be reported with confidence [2] [5] [3] [4].
1. The data problem: ICE’s public statistics don’t flag “wrongful citizen detentions”
ICE publishes arrest, detention and removal statistics that break detained populations by country of citizenship and criminal history, but those public tables are not structured to identify or verify instances of wrongful detention of U.S. citizens on an annual basis, and ICE warns its data are subject to revision and facility-level aggregation that obscures individual citizenship-errors [1] [6].
2. What congressional and oversight probes have verified in discrete cases
A Senate subcommittee report assembled and summarized a set of cases and explicitly provided “short summaries of the detentions of the 22 U.S.” — a documented, case-level accounting used for oversight rather than a comprehensive annual series — showing investigators can verify dozens of individual citizen detentions when they focus on specific inquiries [2].
3. Independent journalism and civil‑society counts point to higher totals, but use different methods
Investigations by outlets and organizations have produced higher cumulative counts: ProPublica’s reporting has identified “over 170” U.S. citizens who were detained by ICE in prior reporting, and the American Immigration Council and TRAC have highlighted hundreds of misidentified cases or the broader problem of ICE misidentifying citizens among those “potentially eligible” for removal [5] [3] [7]. These projects rely on FOIA pulls, casework tracking and media-reported incidents — useful for showing scale but not designed to yield clean, year-by-year official statistics [5] [3].
4. Academic extrapolations suggest very different magnitudes depending on baseline assumptions
Scholarly work cited by advocates has estimated that about 1% of people in immigration detention in historical samples were citizens; applying that percentage to recent high detainee populations produces extrapolations that could imply thousands of citizens detained in a given fiscal year — a figure the Brennan Center flagged as a hypothetical if the 1% rate “has held steady,” but it is an inference rather than a documented annual count [4].
5. Why independent totals diverge and what that means for yearly counts
Differences arise because sources use different denominators (all people arrested versus those booked into ICE custody), different time windows, and different definitions of “wrongful” (misidentified at intake, later confirmed citizen, or wrongfully removed) — ICE’s public dashboards lack a standardized “wrongful citizen detention” flag, congressional probes compile case lists, and NGOs combine FOIA, legal filings, and media accounts, so no source reviewed provides an authoritative annual series from 2016 onward [1] [2] [3] [8].
6. Alternative viewpoints and institutional incentives to under‑ or over‑count
Advocacy groups and some journalists emphasize higher counts to press for reform and accountability, using extrapolation or cumulative case compilations to show systemic risk [3] [5]; ICE and official statistical releases focus on aggregate detention totals and program metrics and do not validate every citizenship determination publicly, which can downplay documented citizen detentions in summary tables [1] [6]. Oversight actors — like the Senate subcommittee — can surface verifiable cases but are limited to their investigative scope [2].
7. Bottom line: what can be stated with confidence
The best-supported factual statements are these: oversight reporting and journalism have documented dozens to low hundreds of U.S. citizens who were detained by ICE in tracked investigations [2] [5] [3]; academic extrapolation and aggregate detainee counts imply the potential for far larger numbers if historical misidentification rates persisted, but that is an estimate not a verified annual count [4] [7]. Therefore, a precise annual number of U.S. citizens wrongly detained by ICE for each year since 2016 cannot be produced from the sources reviewed here because the necessary, consistently coded data do not appear in ICE’s public releases nor in a single comprehensive oversight dataset [1] [2] [3].