What role did Title 42 expulsions play in Biden‑era repatriation totals and how are they counted in DHS statistics?
Executive summary
Title 42 expulsions — pandemic-era rapid expulsions at the border — accounted for the bulk of border departures recorded during March 2020–May 2023 and therefore are a large component of DHS’s “repatriation” totals under the Biden administration (which reach into the millions) because DHS’s repatriation metric explicitly sums removals, returns, and Title 42 expulsions [1] [2]. The principal wrinkle is that expulsions under Title 42 were operationally and legally distinct from formal removals under Title 8, and DHS’s inclusive counting makes repatriation totals much larger than figures that report only court-ordered removals [3] [4].
1. What Title 42 expulsions were and the scale of their use
Title 42 was a public-health authority used from March 21, 2020, through May 11, 2023, to expel people encountered at the border quickly and without standard Title 8 processing or access to asylum prospects [3] [5]; nationwide, CBP and DHS datasets record millions of those expulsions during the period, with most of the roughly three million pandemic-era expulsions occurring while the Biden administration was in office [1] [3].
2. How DHS defines and aggregates “repatriations”
DHS’s repatriations metric explicitly combines Title 8 removals, Title 8 returns, and Title 42 expulsions into a single total — in other words, DHS counts formal deportations, administrative returns, and pandemic expulsions together as “repatriations” [2]. That definitional choice means that a single headline repatriation number is a blend of legally dissimilar actions: court-ordered removals with statutory penalties, administrative returns without penalties, and Title 42 expulsions carried out under public-health authority [2] [4].
3. The numeric contribution of Title 42 to Biden-era totals
Multiple compilations show that Title 42 expulsions composed the majority of border departures recorded during the pandemic window and therefore made up a large slice of DHS’s multi‑million repatriation totals attributed to the Biden years; for example, migration-policy reporting cites nearly 3 million Title 42 expulsions and frames the administration’s nearly 4.4 million repatriations as including those expulsions [1], while FactCheck and DHS data note totals of roughly 2.8 million removals/expulsions counted by CBP and overall DHS repatriations of about 3.7 million through certain reporting periods, with nearly 2.5 million being immediate Title 42 expulsions in CBP’s process data [3] [4]. DHS and congressional compilations likewise document millions of completed encounter events during January 2021–March 2023, most ending in Title 42 expulsions [4] [5].
4. Why counting expulsions with removals matters — legal and statistical implications
Title 42 expulsions carried no Title 8 removal order and therefore did not impose the same legal bars or post-removal consequences that formal removals do, a distinction DHS and others explicitly note; conflating expulsions with removals in aggregate repatriation totals can therefore overstate the number of people subject to formal deportation penalties and obscures recidivism and case‑adjudication dynamics [4] [2]. Practically, ICE also recorded only a subset of Title 42 actions — ICE’s publicly posted Title 42 charter‑flight data represent expulsions it executed, not the whole set of CBP expulsions — which introduces further nuance about which agencies’ figures are being summed [6].
5. Caveats, competing narratives, and hidden incentives in the statistics
Policy advocates and watchdogs point to the large repatriation totals to argue for strict border enforcement, while critics emphasize that counting Title 42 expulsions alongside removals inflates “deportation” rhetoric because expulsions denied asylum access and left little legal record of removal consequences [1] [3] [4]. DHS’s transparent methodological choice to sum Title 42 expulsions into repatriations is documented in its repatriations guidance, but readers must beware that encounter-based tables may count events not unique individuals and that dashboards and datasets have shifted over time — for instance, CBP retired certain dashboards and DHS caveats that encounter events are not the same as unique persons [5] [4] [2]. The result is defensible statistical aggregation but one that can be wielded either to highlight enforcement volume or to obscure how many people faced formal removal orders versus rapid public‑health expulsions [2] [4].