How many senior citizens have been arrested by ice
Executive summary
There is no single, publicly available figure in the provided reporting that answers “How many senior citizens have been arrested by ICE”; ICE publishes comprehensive arrest and detention datasets but the material supplied here does not include an explicit, verified count of arrests by age cohort labeled “senior citizens” [1] [2]. Independent trackers and researchers compile and slice ICE releases — for example The Guardian and TRAC — but those sources warn that ICE’s published arrest figures can undercount certain encounters and that public releases sometimes omit or lag demographic breakdowns that would be needed to calculate a reliable senior-citizen total [3] [4] [5].
1. What the official ICE data offers — and what it does not
ICE’s statistics portal advertises arrests, removals, detention, and alternatives-to-detention tallies and states the agency “confirms the integrity of the data as published on this site,” while warning it cannot attest to subsequent transmissions — meaning age-stratified arrest data may exist in ICE tables but the portal itself is not presented in the reporting as providing an immediate, plain-language total of “senior” arrests [1].
2. How independent trackers try to fill the gap
The Guardian has been archiving ICE’s twice‑monthly detention management releases and scraping ICE’s “Initial Book-Ins” tables to tally arrests, detentions and deportations, but their materials emphasize limitations — ICE reports only arrests that result in someone entering ICE detention, which can undercount other enforcement encounters — and the Guardian’s published datasets in the reporting do not isolate a senior-citizen category [3]. TRAC Immigration maintains age tables and other granular detention statistics that researchers can use to estimate detained populations by age, which suggests the technical possibility of producing a senior arrest count if the relevant age buckets and book-in linkage are available, but the specific number is not provided in the extracts supplied here [4].
3. Data completeness problems that matter for seniors
Multiple reporting threads underline chronic transparency gaps and release delays: the Marshall Project documented periods when ICE stopped updating public detention spreadsheets during a shutdown, leaving researchers unable to verify agency claims or to produce timely demographic breakdowns such as arrests of older adults [5]. Analysts also note that some ICE releases omit short-term facilities, field-office holds, and other encounters that could disproportionately affect certain populations, meaning any senior arrest figure derived from public ICE tables could be a conservative undercount unless carefully reconciled [6] [7].
4. What researchers and advocates recommend to get the number
The clearest path to an authoritative count, according to the reporting, is to merge ICE’s arrest/book-in releases with age-coded tables held by organizations such as TRAC or the Deportation Data Project — both of which curate ICE-origin data and FOIA-derived datasets — and to explicitly define “senior” (for example, 60+, 65+) before summing arrests that resulted in ICE book-ins; however, the reporting does not include such a completed calculation [2] [4]. The Guardian and Deportation Data Project materials also stress methodological caveats: ICE’s book-in-based arrest counts exclude many encounters and therefore any senior-total based solely on book-ins will likely be an undercount [3] [2].
5. Bottom line and next steps for verification
Given the documents provided, a definitive numeric answer cannot be produced here because none of the cited releases or analyses in the packet presents a standalone, validated total of “senior citizens arrested by ICE”; the foundations to compute it exist in ICE book-in tables and age tables curated by TRAC and the Deportation Data Project, but a careful researcher must obtain the latest ICE book-in datasets, choose an age cutoff for “senior,” merge records or aggregate the appropriate age buckets, and account for known undercounts noted by The Guardian and the Marshall Project [1] [4] [3] [5]. Alternative viewpoints are already present in the sources: ICE frames its public statistics as authoritative [1], while independent trackers and watchdogs warn the published numbers can omit encounters and lag in transparency [3] [5].