What percentage of people detained by ICE are actually US citizens
Executive summary
Public sources consulted do not provide a clear, authoritative percentage of ICE detainees who are U.S. citizens; reporting documents dozens of high-profile mistaken detentions and individual cases but no comprehensive citizen-share figure in ICE’s public datasets or the available analyses [1] [2] [3]. Any precise percentage cannot be responsibly stated from these sources because ICE’s published detention-by-country-of-citizenship tables and watchdog reporting referenced here do not isolate or summarize U.S. citizens as a percentage of the detained population in the cited materials [4] [5].
1. What the publicly available ICE and watchdog data actually show
ICE and independent trackers document the size and makeup of the detained population—total detainee counts (for example 66,000–69,000 in early January 2026 are cited across agency releases and monitoring groups) and breakdowns by criminal history—but the accessible tables described in ICE’s statistics and by TRAC track detainees by country of citizenship and criminal-conviction status, not a routinely published percentage labeled “U.S. citizens detained” in the excerpts provided [2] [6] [4] [5].
2. Why a single, reliable percentage is not present in the reporting reviewed
The available sources emphasize totals, criminal-history splits, and country-of-citizenship tallies, while investigative pieces and watchdog reports document mistaken detentions and instances of citizens harmed by enforcement, but none of the cited pages presents a calculated share of detainees who are U.S. citizens—meaning the question cannot be answered precisely from these documents alone [4] [5] [1] [3].
3. What the reporting does document about mistaken detentions and scope
Multiple news reports and compilations list specific cases of U.S. citizens detained or mistreated—ranging from wrongful short-term detentions to alleged deportations and in one reported fatal shooting tied to an ICE agent—showing that citizen mistreatment is real and documented, though presented as individual incidents rather than as a quantified share of all detainees [1] [2] [3].
4. Competing narratives, incentives and why numbers get disputed
Advocacy groups, academic trackers, DHS press releases and partisan outlets frame the same data to different ends: watchdogs and immigrant-rights organizations stress rising detention totals and that a large share of detainees have no criminal convictions (cited as roughly 69–73% nonconvicted in several analyses), while DHS emphasizes arrests of “criminal illegal aliens” and prosecutorial priorities—these framing differences reflect institutional and political incentives that complicate drawing a neutral headline percentage about citizen detentions from the existing disclosures [7] [8] [9] [10].
5. Bottom line for the question asked
From the documents provided, there is no authoritative, published percentage of ICE detainees who are U.S. citizens; the best-supported conclusion is that citizen detentions are documented and legally consequential in specific cases, but the incidence rate as a share of total detentions is not supplied in the cited ICE data summaries and independent analyses here, so a numeric answer cannot be responsibly given without additional ICE data or a data request that isolates “U.S. citizen” as a category in the detention population [4] [5] [1].