How many us citizens have been arrested by ice since 1/20/25
Executive summary
Public records and investigative reporting establish that U.S. citizens were arrested or detained by ICE after January 20, 2025, but there is no definitive, publicly available aggregate count in the sources reviewed; congressional investigators and fact-checkers document multiple individual cases and systemic patterns while ICE and DHS releases focus on overall arrest totals and “criminal illegal alien” tallies without enumerating citizen arrests [1] [2] [3].
1. What the government reports — big arrest totals, small on citizen detail
ICE and DHS releases during 2025 emphasize large numbers of arrests and detentions—ICE told the public that tens of thousands were arrested in early 2025 (for example, ICE cited 32,809 arrests between Jan. 20 and March 10, 2025) and detention populations rose to the mid‑60,000s by late 2025—but those datasets and press statements do not break out a clear count of how many arrestees were U.S. citizens, focusing instead on categories such as “criminal illegal aliens” [4] [5] [6].
2. What oversight and watchdog reporting found — documented citizen arrests but no single tally
A Senate subcommittee report assembled by the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee collected firsthand stories and concluded that American citizens were arrested or detained and that senior officials publicly mischaracterized that reality, but the report presents case narratives and patterns rather than a single numeric total of citizen arrests since Jan. 20, 2025 [1].
3. Independent fact‑checking and journalism — corroboration of incidents, not enumeration
Fact‑checking outlets and investigative journalism documented multiple individual incidents in which U.S. citizens were detained or wrongfully processed by immigration authorities, and they analyzed legal limits on ICE authority, but these pieces similarly stop short of producing an authoritative nationwide count of citizen arrests for the period beginning January 20, 2025 [2] [7] [8].
4. Why an exact number is hard to produce from public sources
The public datasets and agency releases archive arrest totals, detention population snapshots, and programmatic metrics (like 287(g) partnerships), but they either omit citizenship status at the level of a nationwide arrest aggregate or couch figures in categories (e.g., “criminal illegal aliens” versus non‑citizens) that do not reliably capture mistaken or disputed citizen arrests; congressional investigators therefore rely on case files and interviews to document examples rather than an overall tally [9] [3] [1].
5. What the available evidence does establish clearly
Multiple reputable sources converge on two points: first, ICE dramatically increased arrests and detention in 2025 with tens of thousands of actions recorded by the agency and third‑party trackers [4] [3] [10]; second, oversight reporting and fact‑checking show that U.S. citizens were among those at least temporarily arrested or detained, and that some public statements from senior DHS officials denying any citizen arrests were contradicted by the subcommittee’s documented cases [1] [2].
6. Conclusion — the honest answer to “How many?”
There is no single, verifiable public figure in the reviewed reporting that answers “How many U.S. citizens have been arrested by ICE since 1/20/25”; the best-supported conclusion is that U.S. citizens were indeed arrested or detained during that period (contradicting some public denials), but the precise nationwide count has not been released or compiled in the sources available to this review [1] [2] [3].