How many U.S. citizens have been detained by ICE across all administrations, and what data sources exist?
Executive summary
There is no authoritative, agency-wide total for how many U.S. citizens have been detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) across all administrations; public records and oversight reports offer only fragmentary counts and case lists [1]. The most concrete government accounting to date is narrow in time and scope—e.g., a Government Accountability Office (GAO) review and related reporting identified dozens of citizen deportations and a few hundred arrests/detentions in specific periods—but those findings cannot be extrapolated into a reliable all-time total because ICE and DHS do not maintain a consistent, comprehensive public tally [1] [2].
1. The clearest official tallies are limited, time-bound and partial
A GAO review cited in reporting found that up to 70 U.S. citizens were deported by ICE between 2015 and 2020, and the same oversight work identified hundreds of “potential U.S. citizens” arrested and scores detained in that window—figures reported as 674 potential U.S. citizens arrested and 121 detained during the period covered by that review—but those numbers are tied to the GAO’s audit parameters and do not purport to be an agency-wide historical total [1].
2. Congressional oversight and investigative reports show troubling patterns but not a cumulative total
A Senate Homeland Security subcommittee inquiry documented repeated incidents in 2025–2025 where DHS and ICE actions detained U.S. citizens and then resisted transparency; the report underscores that the executive branch at times denied or downplayed citizen detentions even as investigators compiled case evidence, illustrating why no single official cumulative number exists [2].
3. Journalists and nonprofits have built incident lists and partial databases
News organizations and watchdogs have tracked incidents and assembled running tallies of named cases: New York magazine maintained an updated list of American citizens questioned, detained or deported by ICE during recent enforcement waves, and other outlets have published case-based tallies and narrative accounts—useful for illustrating patterns and individual harm but insufficient to produce a definitive aggregate across administrations [3].
4. Official ICE data exists but is structured for operational categories, not citizen‑detention totals
ICE publishes Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) statistics, including arrests and detention-by-country-of-citizenship breakdowns and quarterly counts, but those datasets are primarily designed to report current detention populations, enforcement activity, and foreign-citizen metrics; they do not provide a validated, historical count of U.S. citizens detained by ICE across administrations, and ICE’s public reporting practices have changed over time, further limiting longitudinal aggregation [4].
5. Independent trackers and advocacy groups fill gaps but use varying methods
Research groups and outlets—TRAC, the Deportation Data Project (cited by Prison Policy), The Guardian, American Immigration Council and others—process ICE releases, local jail data and newsroom reporting to estimate arrests, detentions and deportations and to document practices like detaining people with no criminal records; these efforts illuminate scale and trends (for example, rising detention populations in recent years) but differ in definitions, time frames and data sources, so their counts of citizen detentions are not directly combinable into a single authoritative number [5] [6] [7] [8].
6. Why a single, cross‑administration number cannot be produced from available sources
Key obstacles include: inconsistent agency practices for recording or flagging citizenship status at arrest and in detention records; changes over time in the scope and granularity of ICE public releases; the existence of “potential U.S. citizen” classifications in audits (which require verification); and agency resistance or inability to reconcile local jail records, CBP encounters and ICE internal data into a validated national count—facts explicitly noted by oversight reports and investigative journalism [1] [2] [3].
Conclusion — the answer, plainly stated
No reliable, single number exists for “how many U.S. citizens have been detained by ICE across all administrations” in the public record; the best available documented figures are partial and timebound—e.g., GAO reporting that up to 70 citizens were deported and that ICE records showed 674 potential citizen arrests and 121 detentions in the GAO’s reviewed period—and multiple watchdogs, congressional reports and news outlets continue to compile incident-level evidence to fill the gap while official nationwide tracking remains absent or non‑standardized [1] [2] [3] [4]. For researchers seeking a defensible total, the recommended path is to triangulate GAO and congressional oversight findings with ICE’s ERO statistics and independent trackers (TRAC, Deportation Data Project, major investigative outlets) while recognizing the methodological limits of each source [1] [4] [5] [6].