How many documented US citizens have been deported in ice raids?
Executive summary
The best-documented, government-backed estimate is that up to 70 U.S. citizens were mistakenly deported by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during the five-year period 2015–2020, according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) finding cited in public reporting [1]. Reporting and research groups have documented many more instances in which U.S. citizens were detained, questioned, or held by immigration agents—but detentions are not the same as completed deportations, and federal ICE statistics do not publish a comprehensive public tally of citizens actually removed [2] [3].
1. What the official record actually shows: a narrow GAO figure
A nonpartisan review by the GAO—referred to in multiple secondary sources—concluded there were “up to 70” confirmed cases of U.S. citizens being deported by ICE between 2015 and 2020; that figure is the clearest, government-linked data point available in the public record and underpins many later summaries of the problem [1]. ICE’s own public statistical dashboards and Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) reports categorize arrests and removals by country of citizenship but do not present an explicit, routinized metric for proven citizen deportations, leaving space for external audits like the GAO’s [2].
2. Detentions versus deportations: why higher counts circulate
Journalists and nonprofits have uncovered and compiled many incidents in which people who said they were U.S. citizens were detained, shackled, held for days, or otherwise subjected to enforcement actions—ProPublica’s compilation and coverage, and reporting collected by OPB and others, document more than 170 cases of citizens being held by immigration agents, physical mistreatment during operations, or confusion over status—but these investigations generally track detentions and alleged procedural abuses rather than verified completed removals to another country [3]. Media accounts and local reporting often conflate “detained” with “deported,” which inflates public perceptions relative to the narrower set of confirmed removals in the GAO assessment [3] [1].
3. Why counting deported citizens is difficult and contested
ICE and DHS statistics focus on removals of noncitizens and break out arrests by country of citizenship and criminal history, but they are not designed to highlight or regularly audit cases in which citizenship status was incorrectly recorded or where wrongful removals occurred—creating opacity that forces reliance on post hoc oversight and investigative reporting to quantify errors [2]. Advocacy groups and researchers note that local jails, inconsistent data systems, and the speed of enforcement operations make retrospective verification hard; independent projects like the Deportation Data Project and news investigations have filled gaps, but none supplants a routine, agency-level public accounting of citizen removals [4] [5].
4. Competing narratives and potential motivations in the record
The GAO figure has been widely cited because it provides an authoritative check against government claims, yet different actors emphasize different parts of the record: enforcement proponents highlight large removal totals and agency priorities, while civil‑liberties advocates amplify detentions, mistreatment, and cases of wrongful removal to argue for reform and oversight [6] [7]. Some reporting and political rhetoric around raids—in particular, disputes over the Trump administration’s intensified enforcement—has at times framed citizen detentions as systemic abuse, while ICE and DHS frame operations as targeting noncitizen criminality, underscoring an implicit agenda battle over how data should be interpreted and which outcomes merit public scrutiny [5] [6].
5. Bottom line and limits of available evidence
Based on available, cited oversight work, the strongest published figure for documented U.S. citizens actually deported by ICE is “up to 70” over 2015–2020 [1]; many more U.S. citizens have reportedly been detained or held by immigration agents, but detention does not equate to deportation and those incidents are compiled mainly by journalists and nonprofit investigators rather than tallied as removals in ICE’s public datasets [3] [2]. The record is constrained by ICE/DHS reporting practices and by the need for continued independent audits; absent a comprehensive, agency-published breakdown of citizen removals, the GAO number remains the clearest authoritative benchmark in the public domain [1] [2].