There is no single comprehensive dataset, but available research gives rough orders of magnitude for wrongful arrest/conviction generally and for wrongful immigration detention/deportation of U.S. citizens in particular.[1][2]

Wrongful arrest/conviction of citizens (domestic criminal system)

There are no official federal statistics on how many arrests are wrongful (i.e., no legal basis or wrong person), but there is better data on wrongful convictions and exonerations.

• Since 1989, at least 3,175 people in the U.S. have been exonerated after wrongful convictions, collectively serving over 27,000 years in prison.[1]
• Recent exonerations are on the order of a few hundred per year; one estimate notes 233 exonerations in 2022.[1]
• Empirical studies using methods like DNA exonerations and statistical modeling estimate that between about 2–10% of people in U.S. prisons may be innocent, with many analyses clustering around 3–6%.[3][4]
• Applying those percentages to a prison population of roughly 2.3 million incarcerated people yields estimates in the range of roughly 138,000–354,200 people wrongfully imprisoned at any given time (i.e., with convictions they should not have).[1]
• A more conservative back-of-the-envelope estimate suggests that if just 0.5% of people in prison are innocent, about 11,500 people would be wrongfully incarcerated, with perhaps around 975 innocent people newly locked up per year out of roughly 195,000 new convictions.[5]

These figures cover wrongful convictions, not all wrongful arrests; since many wrongful arrests never result in conviction, the number of people wrongfully arrested each year is necessarily larger, but not well quantified in national data.[6][3]

Wrongful immigration arrest/detention of U.S. citizens

Here the data are sparse and fragmented, but multiple investigations show that U.S. citizens are repeatedly swept into the immigration-enforcement system.

• As a matter of law, immigration agencies (ICE, CBP) have no authority to arrest or detain U.S. citizens on civil immigration charges, but policy letters and congressional correspondence acknowledge that they have done so in practice.[7]
• A Government Accountability Office (GAO) analysis cited by the American Immigration Council found that between 2015 and 2020, ICE:
  • Arrested 674 people flagged as “potential U.S. citizens,”
  • Detained 121 of them, and
  • Deported 70 “potential U.S. citizens” from the United States.[2]
• The same discussion notes that poor record‑keeping means these figures are likely undercounts; GAO concluded that ICE and CBP data systems are not reliable enough to definitively identify all erroneous citizen arrests and deportations.[2]
• Earlier data analysis by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) found that between 2002 and 2017, ICE wrongly identified at least 2,840 U.S. citizens as potentially removable and took at least 214 into custody for some period of time.[2]
• A 2025 report and oversight investigation into DHS and ICE practices documents multiple individual cases in which U.S. citizens—including children—were detained for extended periods despite presenting proof of citizenship, with agents refusing to credit that evidence and, in some cases, using force to effect the arrest.[8][7]

These figures suggest that, in a typical recent year, dozens to hundreds of U.S. citizens are arrested or detained in immigration operations, with a smaller (but non‑trivial) subset actually deported before the error is corrected.[8][2]

How often are citizens actually deported by mistake?

The clearest quantitative window is the GAO period (2015–2020):

• 70 “potential U.S. citizens” were deported over about five years, or roughly a dozen to fifteen per year on average, using ICE’s own (incomplete) data.[2]