How many United States citizens have been deported so far

1. What the government counts — why official deportation figures don't answer the question

Federal removal statistics reported by ICE and DHS are framed around noncitizen "removals" and "deportations," and their public dashboards and press releases report totals for people the agencies identify as foreign nationals removed from the United States, not a category labeled "U.S. citizens deported" ^{[1] [5]}. ICE and TRAC publish numbers of removals by fiscal year and by country of citizenship, and TRAC and ICE data were used to report tens or hundreds of thousands of removals in recent reporting, but those datasets are constructed to measure noncitizen enforcement outcomes rather than clerical or legal errors involving citizens ^{[2] [6]}.

2. What the sources say about mistaken deportations of citizens — anecdote, not aggregate

A widely circulated account in the compiled reporting acknowledges that "several American citizens were mistakenly and unfairly detained and deported," but this is presented as anecdotal and part of broader summaries of enforcement excesses rather than backed by an agency-provided aggregate count in the materials here ^[3]. Academic and watchdog sources emphasize expanded detention and accelerated removals that increase the risk of wrongful actions, yet they document system-wide problems (detention surges, use of detention to pressure settlements) rather than producing a definitive count of U.S. citizens deported ^{[7] [8]}.

3. Conflicting and politically charged totals for removals — why that matters to the question

DHS and White House communications in 2025–2026 promoted very large numbers of people "removed" or who "self-deported" — statements such as DHS claiming more than 527,000 removals or more than two million people having left the U.S. combine voluntary departures, CBP returns, and removals and are used as political messaging; independent analysts warn those totals conflate categories and do not illuminate how many, if any, U.S. citizens were erroneously deported ^{[5] [9] [4]}. TRAC and ICE internal tallies give lower, more narrowly defined counts of removals (for example, ICE reported 56,392 removals so far in FY2026 in one dataset), but those counts remain focused on noncitizens and thus do not answer the user's specific question about U.S. citizens ^{[2] [6]}.

4. Expert skepticism and data gaps — the honest answer the sources allow

Scholars and data analysts cited here stress that removal statistics are technically complex, split across agencies (ICE, CBP, Office of Homeland Security Statistics), and subject to definitional choices that mask comparability; investigative commentators have explicitly said DHS claims should be treated skeptically because categories are merged and reporting gaps exist ^{[4] [10]}. Given those admitted data limitations and the absence — in the provided sources — of an official or independently verified aggregate of U.S. citizens who have been deported, the defensible conclusion from these reports is that the number is not publicly documented in the cited material and therefore cannot be stated with confidence from these sources alone ^{[4] [1]}.

5. What to pursue next if a firm number is required

To establish an authoritative count would require either an explicit DHS/ICE release tallying confirmed cases of U.S. citizens wrongly deported or a compiled audit by an independent oversight body or court records search; the documents here point researchers toward ICE statistics pages, TRAC analyses, and investigative critiques as starting points, and caution that political messaging from DHS and the White House inflates some headline totals without clarifying categories relevant to this question ^{[1] [2] [5] [4]}.