How many us citizens have been deported under trump

1. Legal baseline: deporting U.S. citizens is illegal, so any “deportation” of a citizen is anomalous

Under U.S. law the removal of a U.S. citizen from the country is prohibited, which is why every credible report of citizens being detained or expelled is framed as a mistake, a case of administrative error, or the subject of litigation ^[1]. Multiple overviews and watchdog analyses stress that the system is not supposed to produce lawful deportations of citizens, making any actual removals outliers that attract legal scrutiny and lawsuits ^{[2] [5]}.

2. What the public record actually documents: isolated, high‑profile mistakes and lawsuits, not a mass tally

Reporting collected by news outlets, advocacy groups and encyclopedic summaries documents a series of high‑profile detentions, mistaken removals and legal challenges involving U.S. citizens — including children and adults — but those reports describe individual cases and litigation rather than a single numerical total of citizen deportations ^{[1] [6] [7]}. Coverage of the administration’s enforcement surge highlights interior arrests and mass operations by ICE and DHS, and it documents instances where U.S. citizens received notices or were detained, but those items appear as examples and court filings rather than as part of a verified aggregate of citizen removals ^{[8] [9]}.

3. Government statistics: big deportation totals, but no public disaggregation by citizenship

DHS and allied statements during the period emphasize very large numbers of departures and removals — for example, a departmental release claimed more than 622,000 deportations and other releases celebrated hundreds of thousands of departures — but those figures are presented as overall removals and returns and do not provide a publicly available breakdown specifically enumerating U.S. citizens removed ^[3]. Independent analysts and immigration researchers have noted that DHS has not consistently disaggregated removals by citizenship in ways that would produce a trustworthy count of erroneously deported citizens, leaving a data gap ^{[4] [8]}.

4. Known documented cases: examples, litigation and contested claims

Public reporting and legal filings provide concrete examples that show the phenomenon exists on a case‑by‑case basis: encyclopedic and investigative pieces list several named incidents of U.S. citizens being detained or — in some accounts — removed, and civil‑rights groups and courts have taken up lawsuits alleging wrongful deportations or unconstitutional targeting ^{[1] [7] [6]}. Advocates such as the ACLU, NILC and the American Immigration Council have highlighted family separations, mistaken removals of children, and administrative tactics that pushed people toward “self‑deportation,” though these sources document harm and legal challenges rather than a validated national tally of citizen removals ^{[5] [10] [11]}.

5. Bottom line and limits of current reporting

There is no verifiable, public number that answers “how many U.S. citizens have been deported under Trump” because the government’s public statistics do not isolate mistakenly removed citizens and the reporting that exists catalogs individual incidents and lawsuits rather than a comprehensive count ^{[3] [1]}. The safest, evidence‑based answer: only a small number of alleged wrongful detentions and removals of U.S. citizens have been documented in the media and in court records, but researchers and the public do not have a confirmed aggregate figure from DHS or an independent dataset to cite ^{[6] [7]}. Reporting limitations mean further clarification would require DHS to publish a disaggregated accounting or for courts to produce consolidated records; absent that, claims of specific totals — either very large or vanishingly small — are not supported by the sources reviewed ^{[4] [8]}.