ICE Deported At Least 70 American Citizens

Are we surprised by this information? Absolutely not. For a nation that tried to deport Native Americans, nothing surprises us anymore.

A report published by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) solidifies a lot of the rumors that ICE has and does deport US citizens.

VIA NPR

According to the GAO report, between 2015 and 2020, ICE deported at least 70 people who are US citizens. This is a violation of the Constitution and is not only negligent but also illegal. Under civil immigration law, US citizens cannot be deported. Still, GAO uncovered that ICE and Border Protection don’t have the records to know exactly how many people they have illegally deported who are citizens.

In another 2021 GAO report, they found that ICE arrested 674 potential U.S. citizens, detained 121, and deported 70. This is important because none of them were legally required to go through this process, as they are all citizens.

The problem, though, is that this number is likely much higher. We will never know, since the data is not correctly stored or tracked.

This doesn’t even account for the thousands who are wrongly detained. An analysis by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse uncovered that between 2002 and 2017, ICE flagged at least 2,840 US citizens as possibly deportable, and all of them were incorrectly flagged.

Even after repeated warnings and investigations, ICE and Customs and Border Protection continue to operate without meaningful oversight or reform. No one has been held accountable for these illegal deportations, and with such sloppy record-keeping, it’s clear that accountability was never the goal.

And who bears the brunt of these errors? Overwhelmingly, Black and Brown citizens. The same structural racism that drives over-policing in our cities is embedded in our immigration enforcement. Citizenship, to these agencies, is too often presumed only for white, affluent, English-speaking individuals.

This is more than a bureaucratic error; it’s a constitutional crisis hiding in plain sight. When a government can detain and deport its citizens without accountability, it tells us everything we need to know about whose rights are protected and whose are seen as expendable.

These are not isolated incidents; they are the result of a system designed to criminalize and erase. Especially those who are Black, Brown, immigrant, or deemed “other.”

If ICE can deport U.S. citizens with no consequences, then citizenship itself becomes a fragile shield, one that doesn’t protect everyone equally. The question isn’t just how this happened, but why it’s still happening.