No federal agency tracks how many U.S. citizens have been deported, so any answer to the question of how many U.S. citizens have been deported is a floor rather than a total. The Government Accountability Office identified 70 citizens physically removed by ICE in a roughly five-year window ending in March 2020. Independent researchers put the number far higher: a Northwestern University study estimated more than 20,000 U.S. citizens were detained or deported between 2003 and 2010 alone, and a 2025 ProPublica investigation documented over 170 citizens held by immigration agents in the first nine months of the second Trump administration.
Why There Is No Official Count
The federal government does not keep a running tally of citizens caught up in immigration enforcement. The 2021 GAO audit found that ICE policy did not require officers to update the citizenship field in agency databases after encountering evidence that someone might be American, which meant ICE had no systematic way to measure how often its own agents were arresting or deporting citizens. GAO also found that ICE training materials contradicted official policy: while policy required officers to consult a supervisor when someone claimed U.S. citizenship, training guides told officers to simply stop questioning if they personally believed the claim.1U.S. Government Accountability Office. GAO-21-487 Full Report
ICE agreed to change both practices. It revised its training materials in May 2022 and, by February 2025, had issued guidance directing field officers to update biographical data when new evidence of citizenship surfaces.2U.S. Government Accountability Office. Immigration Enforcement: Actions Needed to Better Track Cases Involving U.S. Citizenship Investigations Those changes were prospective. They do not produce a historical count, and no agency has since published one.
The Government’s Own Numbers
The GAO’s audit is the closest thing to an official figure. Reviewing ICE enforcement data from fiscal year 2015 through March 2020, GAO found that ICE:
- arrested 674 potential U.S. citizens,
- detained 121 of them,
- and physically removed 70 from the country.
Over the same stretch, ICE issued immigration detainers, requests that local jails hold someone for immigration pickup, against at least 895 potential citizens, though it later canceled about 74 percent of those holds.2U.S. Government Accountability Office. Immigration Enforcement: Actions Needed to Better Track Cases Involving U.S. Citizenship Investigations
Those numbers cover ICE only. They do not include Customs and Border Protection encounters, state and local jail bookings that never triggered a documented ICE record, or anyone whose citizenship was never flagged in the system in the first place.
Higher Estimates From Independent Research
Three independent efforts have produced substantially larger figures.
The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University analyzed ICE data covering 2002 through 2017 and found that the agency wrongly identified at least 2,840 U.S. citizens as potentially deportable during that period. At least 214 were taken into custody. ICE stopped releasing the underlying data in January 2017.3Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. ICE Wrongly Identified U.S. Citizens as Removable
The Warren Institute at UC Berkeley studied the Secure Communities fingerprint-sharing program. Based on a random sample of 375 flagged individuals extrapolated to the full population booked into ICE custody through April 2011, the researchers estimated roughly 3,600 U.S. citizens were apprehended through the program. Ninety-three percent of those arrested were from Latin American countries, and only 24 percent of those who received immigration hearings had an attorney.4UC Berkeley School of Law. Secure Communities by the Numbers: An Analysis of Demographics and Due Process
The largest published estimate comes from Jacqueline Stevens, a Northwestern University political scientist who directs the Deportation Research Clinic. In a 2011 article in the Virginia Journal of Social Policy and the Law, Stevens estimated that more than 4,000 U.S. citizens were detained or deported as aliens in 2010 alone, and that more than 20,000 citizens were detained or deported between 2003 and 2010. She drew on original data from the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project in Arizona, detention center files, PACER criminal records, and interviews with deported citizens. Stevens acknowledged the figures might seem implausibly high but pointed to immigration laws enacted since the late 1980s that mandate detention and deportation for hundreds of thousands of incarcerated people each year, often without attorneys or administrative hearings.5Jacqueline Stevens. Detaining and Deporting U.S. Citizens as Aliens, Virginia Journal of Social Policy and the Law
These estimates do not overlap cleanly. They cover different time frames, different enforcement programs, and different definitions of “affected” (arrest, detention, removal). Read together, they show a pattern the government’s own count misses: citizen encounters in the thousands per year, not the dozens.
What 2025 Reporting Has Added
An October 2025 ProPublica investigation documented more than 170 incidents during the first nine months of the second Trump administration in which U.S. citizens were held against their will by immigration agents. ProPublica compiled the cases by reviewing court records, lawsuits, and English- and Spanish-language social media, because the federal government does not track such encounters. The outlet called its tally “almost certainly incomplete.”6ProPublica. We Found That More Than 170 U.S. Citizens Have Been Held by Immigration Agents
Of those incidents, more than 50 involved citizens detained after agents questioned their citizenship. Those held on that basis were “almost all Latino.” About 130 more citizens, including a dozen elected officials, were arrested for allegedly assaulting or impeding officers during immigration raids or protests. In nearly 50 of the identified cases, no charges were ever filed or the cases were dismissed. More than 20 citizens reported being held for over a day without access to a lawyer or the ability to contact family. Nearly 20 children were among those detained, including two with cancer.7U.S. Congress. Congressional Document on ProPublica Investigation
Citizen Children Removed With Parents
A separate category involves U.S. citizen children removed from the country alongside undocumented parents. In late April 2025, the Trump administration deported three U.S. citizen children, ages 2, 4, and 7, to Honduras with their mothers from a processing center in Louisiana. One of the children, a 4-year-old boy, reportedly had late-stage cancer and was sent without medication. A Trump-appointed federal judge stated that the 2-year-old had been deported “with no meaningful process.”8PBS NewsHour. Children Who Are U.S. Citizens Deported Along With Foreign-Born Mothers Border czar Tom Homan said the mothers made a “parental decision” to keep their children with them. Attorneys for the families disputed that, saying requests to release the children to legal guardians in the United States were denied.9Axios. Trump Deportations: U.S. Citizen Children
Historical Scale
The modern figures are dwarfed by earlier episodes, though the earlier episodes were carried out through different mechanisms and are not directly comparable to today’s ICE removals.
During the Great Depression, federal, state, and local authorities carried out a “repatriation” campaign that expelled an estimated 400,000 to one million people of Mexican ancestry from the United States between 1929 and 1939. One historical analysis concluded that roughly 60 percent of those removed were U.S. citizens of Mexican descent.10United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Repatriation of Mexican Americans and Mexican Nationals Continues Another placed the figure at 1.2 million U.S.-born citizens out of roughly two million total.11Immigration History. Mexican Repatriation Most removals were not federal deportations. State and local governments, charitable agencies, and private employers organized transportation to Mexico, often under the threat of federal enforcement. The Immigration and Naturalization Service formally removed about 82,000 Mexicans between 1929 and 1935, a small share of the total. In most cases, no federal record of the removal exists.12U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. INS Records for 1930s Mexican Repatriations California formally apologized for the campaign in legislation that took effect in 2006.
The 1954 campaign known as Operation Wetback led to the apprehension of nearly 1.1 million people. Historical accounts confirm that U.S. citizens of Mexican descent were among those deported, though no specific count of affected citizens has been established.13Immigration History. Operation Wetback
Why the Numbers Stay Uncertain
Three factors keep the true count out of reach.
First, database and identification errors drive many wrongful detentions, and they don’t leave a clean record. ICE agents use a biometric screening app called Mobile Fortify and have been instructed to trust its results above actual documentation of citizenship, according to the American Immigration Council. That reliance on automated checks has led to citizens being arrested and held while agents transport them to secondary screening.14American Immigration Council. ICE and CBP Legal Analysis
Second, enforcement patterns concentrate the risk on people who look or sound like agents’ assumptions about noncitizens. The Warren Institute study found 93 percent of Secure Communities arrestees were Latin American. A September 2025 Supreme Court ruling on the shadow docket allowed federal agents to combine race with factors like speaking Spanish or working in certain occupations to establish reasonable suspicion.14American Immigration Council. ICE and CBP Legal Analysis
Third, detained citizens usually cannot prove their status quickly. There is no right to a government-appointed attorney in immigration proceedings, and roughly 70 percent of people in immigration detention go through the process without a lawyer.15Vera Institute of Justice. What Does Due Process Mean for Immigrants and Why Is It Important Davino Watson, a U.S. citizen wrongly identified by ICE after agents confused his father with an unrelated man of a similar name, was held for 1,273 days before a court confirmed his citizenship. He could not secure a lawyer until his case reached the Second Circuit.16NPR. U.S. Citizen Held by Immigration for 3 Years Denied Compensation by Appeals Court
Recourse and Its Limits
Some wrongfully deported citizens have won settlements. Mark Lyttle, a U.S. citizen with bipolar disorder and cognitive disabilities, was detained for 51 days in 2008 and deported to Mexico, then spent 125 days moving through Central America before a U.S. embassy issued him a passport. He settled with the federal government for $175,000 in October 2012.17ACLU. U.S. Citizen Wrongfully Deported to Mexico Settles His Case Against Federal Government Andres Robles Gonzalez, deported to Mexico at 19 in December 2008, settled for $350,000 in May 2015 after litigation showed ICE had known of its error and failed to correct it.18Prison Legal News. Ignorance, Bureaucracy, and Red Tape: U.S. Citizens Mistakenly Deported
Others have been shut out. The Federal Tort Claims Act imposes a two-year statute of limitations, and courts have ruled the clock starts running while the person is still in custody, without a lawyer and unable to prove citizenship. Watson’s initial $82,500 damages award was overturned by the Second Circuit in 2017 on that basis; Roberto Dominguez’s claim was similarly dismissed as time-barred by the First Circuit in 2015.19National Immigrant Justice Center. ICE Faces No Consequences After Erroneously Holding U.S. Citizen20FindLaw. Dominguez v. United States, No. 13-2266 Because many wrongful-deportation claims never survive to a public ruling or settlement, they never appear in a count anyone can add up.
The best answer to the question is a range. At least 70 citizens were removed in the five years GAO reviewed, at least 2,840 were wrongly flagged as deportable between 2002 and 2017, and one credible academic estimate puts detentions and deportations of citizens above 20,000 for a single seven-year window. The real total is somewhere in that spread, and it is still growing.