How many United States citizens have been deported so far since Trump took office
Executive summary
There is no reliable, publicly available tally in the reporting provided that states how many U.S. citizens have been deported since President Trump took office on January 20, 2025; outlets and government statements document individual wrongful removals and an enforcement surge but do not produce an aggregated, verified citizen-deportation number [1] immigration-1st-year" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">[2] [3]. Multiple sources show that citizenship-status mistakes have occurred and that oversight and tracking are incomplete, leaving the question unresolved by the records publicized so far [1] [4].
1. What the records actually say — fragmentary, case-based, and uncounted
Public reporting assembled by Wikipedia and investigative projects documents multiple instances of American citizens who were detained, wrongly targeted, or in some cases deported under the second Trump administration, and explicitly notes the federal government was not tracking the number of detained or missing citizens as of October 2025 — meaning no consolidated official count is available in those sources [1]. Independent research going further back found that ICE named 2,840 U.S. citizens as “eligible for deportation” between 2002 and 2017 and that 214 citizens were arrested by ICE in that earlier period, but those figures are historical and not a count of removals during the current administration [1].
2. Enforcement surge, but focused on noncitizens — not the same as citizen deportations
The Department of Homeland Security and allied reporting emphasize a dramatic increase in arrests, detentions, and removals of noncitizens since January 2025 — DHS and agency statements claim tens or hundreds of thousands of detentions and removals of noncitizens [5] [3], and Migration Policy documents that ICE arrests and detention populations have spiked sharply [2]. Those large figures describe overall removals and interior enforcement of noncitizens and do not equate to a verified tally of U.S. citizens forcibly removed from the country [2] [3].
3. Documented wrongful removals — real cases, but not a statistical total
Reporting and compilations list numerous named cases — for example, citizens detained or temporarily removed, families separated, and at least some deportations later reversed or litigated — illustrating that wrongful actions have occurred [6] [1] [7]. The American Immigration Council and other advocates warn the administration’s policies and reversals of status (temporary protections, TPS etc.) have dramatically increased the number of people exposed to removal risk, and they allege that errors and unlawful removals have followed; these are qualitative, case-driven claims rather than an authoritative numeric total of citizen deportations [4].
4. Why journalists and researchers cannot produce a single number yet
Multiple reporting threads highlight practical barriers: the administration has stopped publishing detailed removals and returns datasets in consistent form, data collection on citizenship status in some cases is incomplete, and oversight groups say thousands of records are opaque or missing — all of which prevent a reliable count of how many U.S. citizens, if any beyond isolated cases, have been removed since January 2025 from being corroborated in the public record provided here [3] [1].
5. Competing narratives and incentives — read the motives behind the numbers
Official statements from DHS and administration allies emphasize high removal totals to showcase policy success [5] [3], while immigrant-rights groups and researchers foreground wrongful detentions and potential undercounting of citizen impacts to press for oversight and legal remedy [4] [1]. Some commentators and partisan outlets have also published large aggregate claims about departures and “self-deportation” that mix voluntary departures, returns at the border, and formal removals — conflating categories that researchers separate when producing accurate counts [8] [9].
6. Bottom line: the question cannot be answered from the provided sources
Based on the reporting assembled here, there is documented evidence that U.S. citizens have been wrongly detained and in some cases affected by deportation actions under this administration, but the sources do not provide a verified, aggregated number of U.S. citizens deported since Trump took office; any firm numeric answer would require access to government removal records that disaggregate citizenship or a detailed independent audit, neither of which is present in these sources [1] [3].