How many Americans has ice arrested?
Executive summary
A precise tally of “how many Americans ICE has arrested” is not published in the sources available: ICE reports nationwide arrest totals for its enforcement operations, but does not provide a public, cumulative count of U.S. citizens arrested by the agency, and independent reporting shows isolated incidents of citizens detained by ICE (AP) without offering a comprehensive national number [1] [2]. What the public record does show is the scale of ICE’s administrative arrests and the sharp rise in interior enforcement in 2025–2026, which frames why questions about citizen arrests matter [3] [4] [5].
1. What the question actually asks and why it’s hard to answer
The user’s phrase “How many Americans has ICE arrested?” can mean two different things: the total number of people ICE has arrested (most of whom are noncitizens), or specifically how many U.S. citizens have been arrested by ICE, a much narrower — and poorly tracked — subset; federal reporting focuses on immigration status and enforcement volumes rather than an authoritative count of mistakenly or intentionally detained U.S. citizens, so a conclusive figure for citizens simply isn’t available in ICE’s public datasets or in the sampled reporting [1] [2].
2. How many arrests ICE reports overall
ICE publishes Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) arrest statistics and, according to multiple trackers and reporting, ICE has returned to very high interior-arrest volumes: sources tracking ICE releases and aggregated federal data show hundreds of thousands of administrative arrests across recent years (for example, USAFacts reported 102,410 ERO administrative arrests January–November 2024 and broader tallies for 2024 totaled roughly 149,070 arrests when including criminal and HSI actions) and ICE’s public statistics are the basis for biweekly tracking by outlets like The Guardian [3] [1] [6].
3. Scale of 2025 enforcement and detention context
Independent analyses and advocacy groups found ICE arrest rates surged in 2025, with reporting that ICE was arresting “over 1,000 a day” in some analyses and that detention populations hit record highs (more than ~66,000–68,400 people in detention by late 2025), underscoring the practical scale of interior enforcement even if those totals mix noncitizens and people with varying charge histories [4] [5] [7] [8].
4. Who ICE says it arrests vs. what datasets show
DHS and ICE have publicly framed enforcement as targeting those with criminal convictions or pending charges — officials have asserted roughly 70% of ICE arrests are of people with convictions or pending criminal charges — but leaked data analyses and civil‑liberties research indicate a large share of arrests are of people without criminal convictions (Cato and other data show high shares without convictions and UC‑Berkeley’s Deportation Data Project corroborates patterns), revealing a contested picture of ICE’s arrest mix [9] [10] [11] [4].
5. Are U.S. citizens counted among those arrested, and how many?
Reporting documents individual cases of U.S. citizens being detained or arrested by immigration officers — for example, AP reported U.S. citizens in Minneapolis who said they were detained briefly by immigration officers — but the sources do not provide a national aggregate of citizen arrests, and ICE’s public datasets do not publish a consistent field that yields a defensible nationwide count of U.S. citizens arrested by ICE, so a verified, single-number answer is not supported by the available reporting [2] [1].
6. Data gaps, incentives, and how to get closer to an answer
The absence of a clear public tally stems from how enforcement data are categorized (ICE focuses on administrative arrests of noncitizens and collates by arresting agency, AOR, or criminality rather than citizenship errors), from classified or leaked datasets interpreted by think tanks and advocacy groups, and from political incentives on all sides to emphasize either the “worst of the worst” narrative (DHS/ICE) or the scale of noncriminal interior arrests (advocates and researchers), which complicates independent verification of citizen‑arrest counts [1] [11] [10] [4].
7. Bottom line
Public sources document the large scale of ICE’s arrests (hundreds of thousands across recent years and very high interior arrest rates in 2025) and show that individual U.S. citizens have been detained in specific incidents, but they do not supply a reliable national count of how many U.S. citizens ICE has arrested; therefore no precise numeric answer for “how many Americans” can be confidently asserted from the provided reporting [3] [4] [2] [1].