How many shootings by ice agents in the Obama years and how many in the Biden years

1. The core reporting restraint: ICE’s records are opaque

Journalistic and legal reporting repeatedly notes that ICE has refused to publish a straightforward, public log of agent-involved shootings, forcing reporters and researchers to sue or compile incidents from scattered local records, internal memos and media accounts—The Trace sued for shooting logs and only obtained records after two years of litigation, yet the excerpts provided do not translate to a clean Obama-vs-Biden count in the material supplied here ^{[1] [3] [2]}.

2. What investigative outlets did count (and what they counted)

Investigations uncovered dozens of individual shootings across multiple years and administrations, and The Trace’s reporting cataloged multiple incidents—including 18 shootings involving moving vehicles among cases it examined—while acknowledging that many incidents involve HSI agents as well as ICE civil-enforcement officers, complicating simple tallies ^[3]. Other outlets have tracked recent spikes under later administrations: The Guardian and other papers reported 16 agent-involved shootings early in the Trump 2025 period and described a surge in 2025, but those accounts focus on the current spike rather than producing retrospective, administration-by-administration totals for Obama and Biden ^[4].

3. The data that is available — fragments and context, not totals

Some sources provide related numbers—such as detainee deaths or specific subsets of incidents—but do not equate to the requested count of shootings by ICE agents in each administration: an advocacy report cites 56 detainee deaths during the Obama era in the context of detention conditions, which is not the same metric as agent-involved shootings ^[5]. PBS and Reuters explicitly noted that DHS did not answer requests for numbers about agent-involved shootings, underlining the limits of official transparency that prevent a reliable cross-administration comparison based on the sources provided ^{[2] [6]}.

4. Why a simple numeric comparison is misleading without standardized definitions

Available reporting shows that incidents attributed to “immigration agents” sometimes involve multiple DHS components (ICE, HSI, CBP and Border Patrol), off-duty officers using agency weapons, and operations with state or local partners—factors that mean any credible count requires explicit methodological choices on who to include and what qualifies as an ICE shooting; some media trackers include all DHS immigration agents, others isolate HSI or ICE civil-enforcement officers, which produces inconsistent totals ^{[3] [7]}.

5. What the evidence does establish about patterns and accountability

While sources stop short of delivering the requested per-administration totals, they converge on two clear findings: first, there is a pattern of shootings across administrations that investigative reporters have traced to both on-duty operations and off-duty incidents, including cases where agents fired into moving vehicles and where accountability is sparse ^{[3] [1]}. Second, journalists and officials repeatedly highlight gaps in oversight—courts, local prosecutors and civil-rights investigators are often the only bodies that can compel fuller disclosure, and political actors on all sides have incentives to shape the narrative around high-profile cases ^{[1] [8]}.

6. Bottom line for the question asked

Based on the supplied reporting, a precise numeric answer—“X shootings under Obama; Y shootings under Biden”—cannot be responsibly provided because ICE declined to release consolidated statistics and public reporting remains patchwork; the Trace obtained records only after litigation and other outlets repeatedly reported that DHS would not supply a definitive count, meaning the sources available here do not contain the explicit administration-by-administration totals requested ^{[1] [2] [3]}.