How many US citizens with no criminal recorded has ICE detained since in Trump’s second term?

1. What the public data actually counts — and what it doesn’t

Public reporting and data releases cited in this file measure people arrested by ICE and whether they have criminal records, not reliably whether they are U.S. citizens; for example, university and media analyses show nearly 75,000 people arrested in the first nine months had no criminal record and government releases count tens of thousands of detainees with no criminal history ^{[1] [4] [2]}. Those large numbers refer to immigration enforcement subjects broadly and are used by outlets like The Independent, People, Fortune and The Guardian to show a surge in noncriminal detentions, but the datasets and reporting cited do not provide a comprehensive, validated breakdown by citizenship status that would produce a single “U.S. citizens detained” number ^{[1] [5] [6]}.

2. Documented examples of U.S. citizens detained — illustrative, not comprehensive

Reporting contains numerous high-profile and local accounts of U.S. citizens who say they were detained by ICE—cases include journalists, civic monitors and residents detained during operations or mistakenly taken into custody—which demonstrate the phenomenon is real but anecdotal in scope in the provided sources ^{[3] [7] [8]}. Aggregated lists and timelines in secondary compilations, such as Wikipedia’s chronologies and newsroom investigations, catalogue many incidents but do not claim a complete, government-verified total of citizen detentions ^{[8] [9]}.

3. Why an aggregate number of citizen detentions is missing from these sources

Analysts warn that ICE and DHS reporting practices, redactions, and the structure of arrest/detention datasets make it difficult to isolate citizenship status across the universe of detentions; Prison Policy Project and other commentators note dataset limitations and missing identifiers that prevent clean counting of specific subgroups like U.S. citizens ^[10]. Meanwhile, many of the dramatic headline numbers focus on “no criminal record” as a classification distinct from citizenship, producing sound bites about 2,450% or 800% increases in noncriminal detentions without supplying a corresponding “U.S. citizens detained” figure ^{[11] [12] [6]}.

4. Competing narratives and institutional defenses

Administration and DHS spokespeople push back that ICE is targeting “the worst of the worst,” and departmental officials emphasize that many in custody have convictions or pending charges, a framing repeated in reporting that quotes DHS and ICE statements ^{[2] [5]}. Critics and nonprofits counter with data analyses showing the majority of those in ICE custody during this period lack criminal convictions, and with detailed case reporting of citizens detained—an implicit political and oversight battle is playing out between accountability advocates and agency defenders ^{[13] [5]}.

5. Conclusion: the answer, and where to go next

Based on the documents provided, there is no authoritative, sourced count of how many U.S. citizens with no criminal record ICE has detained since the start of Trump’s second term; the available material documents many individual citizen detentions and large totals of people with no criminal history arrested by ICE, but it does not permit producing a verified numeric answer for citizen-only detentions ^{[1] [3] [10]}. Obtaining a defensible figure would require access to ICE or DHS case-level records with reliable citizenship markers or a congressional/inspector-general audit that specifies citizenship status—neither of which appears in the supplied reporting ^{[10] [13]}.