What reforms has the GAO or Congress recommended to prevent wrongful detentions and deportations of U.S. citizens?
Executive summary
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has repeatedly identified systemic failures that leave U.S. citizens vulnerable to wrongful arrest, detention, and—even possibly—removal, and has offered concrete, implementable fixes: update ICE training to align with official citizenship-investigation policy and systematically collect electronic data on encounters where U.S. citizenship is at issue [1] [2]. Congress has responded with oversight and at least one legislative proposal aimed at addressing wrongful detention more broadly, while GAO and other reviews have also urged better data collection on detained parents of U.S. citizen children and clearer inspection metrics for detention facilities [3] [4] [5].
1. GAO’s core recommendations: fix training and tracking
GAO’s 2021 review concluded that ICE’s written policies require supervisory involvement when someone claims U.S. citizenship, but ICE’s training materials sometimes instruct officers to stop questioning if the officer believes the person—an inconsistency GAO said must be corrected by updating training to reflect policy [1] [2]. Equally central was GAO’s recommendation that ICE “systematically collect and maintain electronic data” on encounters involving potential U.S. citizens so the agency can measure and address wrongful actions—because without reliable data ICE “does not know the extent” to which officers take enforcement actions against people who could be citizens [1] [2].
2. Additional GAO recommendations: data on families and detention oversight
Beyond citizen-investigation guidance, GAO found gaps in ICE data collection relating to detained parents or guardians of U.S. citizen or LPR minors and recommended collecting readily available information to protect families and ensure compliance with policy [3]. GAO also flagged weaknesses in DHS and ICE facility inspection programs—urging clearer goals and performance measures so detention conditions and complaints receive meaningful review, which indirectly affects wrongful detention risks [4] [6].
3. What Congress has done or proposed
Congressional oversight has amplified these findings: House committees maintain incident dashboards that categorize misconduct including “concerning deportation” and tag incidents involving U.S. citizens, signaling legislative scrutiny and public accountability [7]. In the Senate, S.1478—the Countering Wrongful Detention Act of 2025—addresses wrongful detention in an international context and creates bodies and reporting requirements tied to wrongful detention abroad, showing that Congress is considering statutory remedies to wrongful detention though not limited to immigration enforcement inside the U.S. [5].
4. Agency response and implementation status
DHS concurred with GAO’s principal recommendations to update training and improve data collection, an important first step but one that stops short of documented implementation in GAO’s public tracking; GAO has ongoing work and DHS publishes implementation-status summaries that show varied progress across its recommendations [1] [8]. Separately, ICE’s public statistics programs remain focused on conventional enforcement metrics, which GAO says are insufficient to surface citizenship-investigation errors without the new, targeted data elements GAO recommended [9] [1].
5. Remaining gaps, contested claims, and the political context
GAO explicitly warned that incomplete ICE records prevent knowing the full scope of wrongful actions, and outside analyses—like Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse reporting cited by advocates—have produced higher estimates of misidentified citizens, illustrating dispute over scale that stems largely from missing official data [1] [10]. Advocacy groups, litigators, and legal-service sites also push for administrative fixes such as correcting USCIS A-files to prevent repeat detentions—measures GAO did not prescribe but that practitioners say reduce recurrence [11]. Political pressures, resource constraints, and varying priorities across DHS components create implicit agendas that can slow uniform adoption of GAO’s recommendations [8].
6. Bottom line: concrete, narrow reforms with measurable benchmarks
GAO’s reforms are focused and practicable: align training materials with policy to prevent premature cessation of citizenship interviews and build a searchable electronic record of encounters where citizenship is in question so ICE and Congress can measure and remedy errors; complementary GAO recommendations on family data and detention oversight would further reduce harms [1] [3] [4]. Congress has tools—oversight dashboards, hearings, and legislation like S.1478—to translate those recommendations into enforceable requirements, but GAO’s work makes plain that without full implementation and public reporting, the underlying problems will persist [7] [5] [8].