How many people did ICE shoot under the Obama Administration compared to the Trump Administration?
Executive summary
Reporting shows a sharp rise in shootings involving federal immigration agents during the first year of President Trump’s second administration, with media tallies documenting at least 16 incidents in late 2025 and early 2026 [1]; by contrast, the available sources do not produce a definitive, comparable count of how many people were shot by ICE-era agents during the Obama administration, and ICE has not supplied an authoritative historical tally for either period [2] [3]. Deaths in ICE custody are better documented in these sources — 56 deaths over Obama’s two terms is cited in several outlets, while 2025 under Trump saw 32 custody deaths — but custody deaths are a different metric than agent-involved shootings and cannot substitute for a direct shooting count [4] [5].
1. The concrete numbers available for the Trump administration: media tallies and local flashpoints
Investigations and newsroom counts compiled after an aggressive interior-enforcement surge in 2025 identified at least 16 separate incidents in which ICE agents shot at people, with reporting noting four deaths and seven injuries from those events through early January 2026 [1]; local high-profile killings in Minneapolis — including Alex Pretti and Renee Good — prompted national coverage, administrative leave for officers, and calls for independent probes [6] [2] [7].
2. Why an Obama-era shooting total is not in the record provided: missing data and agency opacity
None of the supplied sources offer a compiled, authoritative count of shootings by ICE agents during Barack Obama’s 2009–2017 presidency, and multiple reporters note that ICE and DHS have declined to provide comprehensive figures when asked, making direct comparisons difficult or impossible from the materials at hand [2] [3]; Wikipedia and media lists often conflate or fail to distinguish between ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) shooters, further muddying any historical tally [3].
3. Related metrics that are available — custody deaths and error rates — and why they’re not the same thing
Some outlets cite 56 people who died in ICE custody across Obama’s two terms as a reported figure, while other coverage highlights that 32 people died in ICE custody in 2025 alone, marking a two‑decade high for the agency — these custody-death counts are documented in the sources but do not measure agent use-of-force shootings in the field, and several analyses make the explicit distinction between custody mortality and shootings by operational agents [4] [5] [1].
4. Interpreting the discrepancy: enforcement levels, agency composition, and media focus
Observers and advocacy groups say the spike in agent-involved shootings in late 2025 coincides with a rapid expansion of arrests and detentions under the Trump administration and increased deployments of mixed DHS forces, which complicates attribution between ICE and CBP personnel [1] [8]; meanwhile, partisan media narratives and different statistical framings — for example, rate-based comparisons that normalize by detention volumes — have been used to argue both that Trump-era error/death rates are lower and that the absolute harms have risen, illustrating how choice of denominator and which incidents are counted can change the conclusion [9] [4].
5. Bottom line and limits of what can be asserted from these sources
From the reporting provided, it is accurate to say that independent news counts documented at least 16 agent-involved shootings under President Trump’s second administration through early January 2026 and that high-profile fatal shootings prompted federal reviews and political outcry [1] [2] [6]; however, the supplied sources do not contain a vetted, aggregated count of how many people ICE agents shot across the entirety of the Obama administration, and ICE’s lack of transparent, centralized incident reporting prevents a reliable historical comparison based on the documents given [2] [3].