What are CBP's official 'encounter' totals by fiscal year and how do they differ from unique migrant counts?
Executive summary
CBP’s public “encounters” series reports total encounter events by fiscal year—summing Border Patrol apprehensions, Office of Field Operations inadmissibles at ports, and Title 42 expulsions—but it counts events not unique people and can therefore overstate how many distinct migrants were involved (CBP defines encounter components and cautions on data revisions) [1] [2]. Officials and outside analysts note that repeat encounters have historically reduced the number of unique individuals relative to total encounters, with pre-pandemic repeat rates around 1-in-8 and much higher short-term recidivism under Title 42 in some months [3] [4].
1. What CBP’s “encounter” totals are and how they’re assembled
CBP’s nationwide encounter totals aggregate three categories: U.S. Border Patrol Title 8 apprehensions, Office of Field Operations (OFO) Title 8 inadmissibles at ports of entry, and Title 42 expulsions; dashboards break these down by region (Southwest Land Border, Northern Land Border, and Nationwide including air and sea) and by fiscal year (FY) [1] [5]. The agency publishes fiscal-year summaries (FY2017–FY2026 are available in summary tables) and monthly updates, and explicitly warns that encounter counts are extracted from live systems and subject to revision for data corrections or definitional changes [6] [1]. Congressional and agency releases have cited large annual totals—for example, CBP reported roughly 1.72 million enforcement encounters in FY2021 in its operational release (with component breakdowns for single adults, family units, and unaccompanied children) [3], and congressional materials cited roughly 2.9 million nationwide encounters in FY2024 (including about 2.37 million at the Southwest border during FY2017–FY2020 comparison context) [7].
2. Why encounters are not the same as unique migrant counts
CBP’s encounter metric counts events, not distinct people: a person who is turned back and then later apprehended again generates multiple encounters, and OFO port totals “may include multiple encounters of the same individual,” a caveat CBP repeats across enforcement publications [8] [6]. CBP itself has stated that “the number of total encounters overstates the number of unique people” and noted pre-pandemic that about one in eight encounters involved someone encountered in the prior year [3]. During Title 42 and other operational regimes, short-term recidivism spiked: CBP’s August 2023 update reported that in April 2023 repeat encounters made up nearly 23% of overall encounters, while by August 2023 the one‑year re‑encounter rate along the Southwest border was about 11% and CBP estimated 164,911 unique individuals for that month’s Southwest total [4].
3. How third parties and analysts adjust encounters into unique estimates
Independent analysts and advocacy groups have used CBP data to estimate unique individuals by de‑duplicating records within a 12‑month window or by applying observed recidivism rates; for example, an American Immigration Council analysis compared total and “unique encounters” figures for FY2019 and FY2021, noting 780,479 encounters versus 721,328 unique encounters in FY2019 and a much larger gap during 2021’s surge when unique counts lagged total encounters [9]. Other DHS-derived tools and dashboards (OHSS/KHSM) explicitly warn about classification issues—such as family-member grouping that can overcount or undercount categories—and note unknown overcounts in some records (under 320,000 in a dataset caveat) that complicate clean de‑duplication [10].
4. What this means for interpreting headline numbers and policy debates
The headline encounter totals are useful for operational workload and trend tracking, but they can mislead when cited as “people” because repeat crossings and procedural churn inflate event counts; CBP and outside researchers both document this limitation and provide monthly/annual recidivism statistics to help adjust interpretations [1] [3] [4]. Political actors selectively emphasize either raw encounter volumes (to argue crisis or success) or de‑duplicated unique counts (to argue a different scale), so readers should check whether a cited figure is “encounters” or “unique individuals” and look for the methodological caveats CBP publishes alongside its dashboards [6] [2]. Where public sources do not publish finalized de‑duplicated person counts for every FY, reporting must rely on CBP’s repeat‑encounter rates and independent de‑duplication methods to estimate unique migrant totals [3] [10].