Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are arresting US citizens by mistake and holding them at detention centers for months — sometimes even years — without having any solid evidence against them, a report says.

Since 2012, the Los Angeles Times has found that more than 1,480 Americans have been released from ICE custody following an investigation of their citizenship claims.

The newspaper uncovered the data during a recent review of federal lawsuits, internal ICE documents and interviews with immigration attorneys.

Agency figures show that hundreds of US citizens have been accidentally thrown behind bars over the years — with agents basing their arrests on “incomplete government records, bad data and lax investigations,” the Times says.

Immigration lawyers told the paper that they’ve uncovered countless cases in federal court involving citizenship claims. They said that several people have been forced to spend months and sometimes years locked up as they attempt to prove they are American.

According to the Times, the most widely mistaken groups of people are children of immigrants and citizens born outside the US.

ICE agents have also been known to arrest individuals repeatedly in the past because the government failed to update their records, the paper reports.

“You feel like your rights are stripped from you,” explained Davino Watson, a Jamaican native from New York who was wrongfully held for more than three years.

“You feel hopeless.”

Watson had been serving time in a state prison for selling drugs when ICE found him and took him in for questioning, the Times reports.

He told agents that he was a US citizen via his father, who had naturalized. But that didn’t do him any good.

The person put in charge of finding Watson’s dad wound up botching the search results — by selecting the wrong name. He got transferred to an ICE detention center in Alabama and was wrongfully held there for three and a half years.

“It was very hard to understand,” Watson said. “I spent many nights crying.”

The Times spoke to several other citizens who were mistakenly held over the years, including a Rhode Island housekeeper who was detained twice — and a California landscaper who got snatched up by a Homeland Security agent while standing in a Home Depot parking lot.

“You’re making a big mistake,” Sergio Carrillo recalled telling the agent after getting handcuffed and tossed in the back of a squad car.

“I am a US citizen,” he said.

The man’s mother had moved to California from Mexico when he was a child, granting him automatic citizenship. But Carrillo claims ICE agents repeatedly ignored his claims and refused to follow up on them.

He was later taken to a federal facility in the Mojave Desert, where he spent four days locked up — despite there being no evidence against him, according to the Times.

“Inmates were telling me, ‘You’re not going to see a judge for weeks. In here, you don’t have any rights,’” Carrillo remembered. “I started getting real scared: How long was I going to be in here? How could this be happening?”

The landscaper said he lost several clients as a result of the detention. He later sued for false imprisonment and netted a $20,000 settlement, though ICE never admitted to any wrongdoing.

In response to the Times review, ICE officials released a statement saying: “US Immigration and Customs Enforcement takes very seriously any and all assertions that an individual detained in its custody may be a US citizen.”

Matthew Albence, the head of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, told the paper that the agency tries to update records when errors are discovered, but Carrillo feels that isn’t enough.

“For ICE, it’s like, ‘Oops, we made a mistake,’” he said. “But for me on the other end, it tears up your life.”