how many people were shot by ice under obama

February 18, 2026

There is no reliable public number that specifically answers “how many people were shot by ICE under Obama,” and any exact figure you see online should be treated as an estimate, not a confirmed official count.

Quick Scoop

1. What we actually know

The U.S. government has not published a comprehensive, administration‑by‑administration tally of ICE shooting incidents, so there is no official “Obama ICE shooting” total you can just look up.

Investigative work cited in forums and commentary pieces notes that from about 2015–2021 (late Obama years through early Biden), ICE agents were involved in around 59 shootings , with roughly 23 of those shootings being fatal.

Those 59 shootings span multiple administrations , not just Obama’s, and the underlying report does not give a clean, public breakdown of “X under Obama, Y under Trump, Z under Biden.”

Put simply: people were shot and killed by ICE agents during the Obama years, but the precise shooter‑by‑administration tally is fragmented and uncertain.

2. Why numbers online don’t match

You’ll see different figures floating around in current debates, short videos, and forums:

Some posts highlight “56 deaths in ICE custody under Obama” as a talking point.

That “56” figure refers to all deaths in ICE custody (illness, suicide, medical neglect, etc.), not specifically people shot by agents.

Other social‑media clips and podcast segments say things like “ICE shootings happened under Obama, people were injured and people died” to argue that outrage is selective, but they usually don’t provide a sourced, administration‑only shooting count.

So you’ll see:

“56 deaths in custody” → about detention conditions overall, not shootings.

“59 shootings / 23 deaths (2015‑2021)” → an investigative estimate that covers part of Obama plus later years , not just his presidency.

3. Best current estimate (with caveats)

From the public investigative work summarized in that forum discussion, plus scattered reporting:

2015–2021: about 59 ICE shootings total, 23 fatal , spread across late Obama, Trump, and early Biden.

For the full Obama era (2009–2017) , the same discussion characterizes the evidence as a “conservative estimate” of roughly 8–12 fatal ICE shootings , with the lower end more likely if you limit it strictly to clearly documented firearm killings by ICE agents.

Because there is no official, fully broken‑down dataset and earlier incidents are poorly tracked, even that 8–12 range is an informed estimate , not a hard fact.

In other words: we can say that multiple people were shot and some killed by ICE agents during the Obama administration , but we cannot honestly give a precise, universally accepted number for “how many people were shot by ICE under Obama.”

4. Why it matters how we frame this

This topic is often used in today’s arguments about double standards and public outrage around immigration enforcement:

Some commentators claim that people only became outraged about ICE shootings or deaths when different presidents took office, not when similar or worse things happened under Obama.

Advocates and legal groups, on the other hand, stress that they did raise concerns during the Obama years, but those warnings didn’t get as much mainstream attention as the later political fights.

However you view the politics, it’s important not to mix:

“Deaths in ICE custody” (a larger number, covering all causes), and
“People shot by ICE agents” (a smaller, less clearly documented subset).

Conflating those two makes it easier for people to misuse the statistics or to underplay how serious the underlying human rights issues are.

Bottom line: There is no official, precise count of how many people were shot by ICE under Obama, but credible investigative work suggests a small number of documented fatal shootings—on the order of roughly 8–12 across his two terms—within a broader pattern of at least dozens of ICE shootings that continued into later administrations.