How many Citizens were detained By ICE in2023

1. Defining the question: who do ICE statistics count?

ICE public reporting and DHS statistical systems frame detention metrics around people in ICE custody—referred to as "aliens," "people booked into ICE custody," or detainees in removal proceedings—so the datasets are structured to measure non‑citizen enforcement activity ^{[1] [2]}; independent researchers who publish detention dashboards (Vera, Deportation Data Project, TRAC) likewise treat the records as ICE custody events and base analysis on ICE’s administrative files rather than a separate citizen/non‑citizen breakdown ^{[3] [4]}.

2. What the sources report for FY2023 (bookings and population totals)

Multiple sources converge on the scale of ICE’s FY2023 activity: one commonly cited figure is roughly 273,220 people booked into ICE custody during Fiscal Year 2023 (reported in summary materials and secondary sources) ^[5], while other trackers report that the detained population rose to about 32,743 at the end of FY2023 and that average daily detention populations in that period were in the high‑20,000s ^{[6] [5]}. ICE’s own statistical pages and the DHS OHSS site emphasize that these numbers reflect administrative book‑ins/book‑outs and are subject to revision and definitional limits ^{[1] [2]}.

3. Why these figures do not answer "how many citizens were detained"

None of the official ICE publications or the DHS OHSS KHSM pages in the reviewed set publish a breakdown that isolates U.S. citizens detained by ICE; they treat detainees as people in ICE custody—typically non‑citizens—because ICE’s statutory role is immigration enforcement, not custody of citizens ^{[1] [2]}. Independent compilations (Vera, Deportation Data Project, TRAC) derive their records from ICE administrative files obtained via FOIA and mirror ICE’s categories, meaning their public dashboards and tables likewise do not provide a reliable count of U.S. citizens held under ICE authority in 2023 ^{[3] [4]}.

4. Conflicting framings and hidden agendas in reporting

Advocacy groups and policy briefs emphasize the aggregate scale of people ICE processed—some assert "more than 260,000 people over the last year" to underline system expansion and human‑rights concerns, a framing that highlights total bookings rather than citizenship status and advances calls to reduce detention ^{[7] [8]}. Conversely, government pages stress methodological caveats—quarterly arrears, data revisions and that numbers reflect ICE administrative categories—an institutional emphasis on data integrity that can obscure whether, and how, exceptional cases (e.g., mistaken book‑ins of citizens) are captured or corrected ^{[1] [2]}.

5. Bottom line: the direct answer and best available proxies

A direct numeric answer to "How many citizens were detained by ICE in 2023" cannot be supplied from the examined sources because ICE and DHS reporting count and publish detention events for people in ICE custody (generally non‑citizens) and do not provide a public, validated tabulation of detained U.S. citizens for FY2023 in these datasets ^{[1] [2]}. The best available, reliably cited proxies are the FY2023 booking total (~273,220 booked into ICE custody) and end‑of‑year detained population figures (about 32,743 detained at the end of FY2023), but those numbers refer to people in ICE custody, not to U.S. citizens specifically ^{[5] [6]}.

6. Where to look next for a narrower answer

To pursue a definitive count of U.S. citizens detained by or mistakenly held in ICE custody in 2023 would require records-level queries: FOIA requests to ICE and DHS seeking citizenship status fields in Enforcement Integrated Database (EID) book‑in records, or targeted audits from OHSS/DHS that explicitly report citizenship disaggregations; independent datasets (Vera, Deportation Data Project, TRAC) may be able to answer if their raw FOIA‑obtained records include citizenship flags and researchers disclose them, but that level of detail was not present in the reviewed summaries ^{[3] [4] [2]}.