Are cpb border numbers accurate under trump
Executive summary
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) public releases show dramatic declines in “encounters,” “apprehensions” and “gotaways” since President Trump took office, and federal statements characterize the border as the “most secure in modern history” [1] [2] [3]. Independent fact‑checking and media analysis, however, warn that many of those claims rest on selective time windows, shifting definitions and politicized comparisons that make headline percentages — like “95%” or “99.99%” declines — potentially misleading without careful context fact-checking-the-trump-white-houses-claims-about-illegal-immigration-dropping-sharply" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">[4] [5].
1. CBP’s own data: big declines, repeated in official releases
CBP and DHS releases from 2025 and 2026 repeatedly report historically low monthly and daily encounter totals, streaks of “zero releases” by Border Patrol, and month‑over‑month drops described as 90%+ compared with prior administration averages — for example, statements that southwest border apprehensions fell to roughly 258 per day versus a prior administration average of 5,110/day and that fiscal starts logged the lowest encounters in CBP history [6] [7] [3] [8].
2. How the metrics work — and why they matter
The principal CBP metric is “encounters,” the count of individual contacts between agents and migrants (a group of 10 counts as 10) and related subcategories include “apprehensions,” “encounters at ports of entry,” and “gotaways” (people believed to have crossed without being stopped) — each can move independently of one another and tell different operational stories, so raw encounter totals don’t alone answer whether migration or enforcement changed in the ways political messaging implies [5] [9].
3. Independent checks find selective comparisons and time‑window problems
Fact‑checkers have flagged instances where White House or allied media graphics compared a long period (a full fiscal year) to a brief snap‑shot under Trump or mixed encounters at ports of entry with between‑ports encounters, producing striking percentage drops that overstate what a consistent, apples‑to‑apples comparison would show [4]. The PBS analysis specifically noted a claim of a 95% drop that, when recalculated against comparable windows, looked closer to a 60% decline in one cross‑check [4].
4. Institutional incentives and potential biases in messaging
CBP and DHS are part of an administration that has strong political incentives to depict policy success; their press language and framing — “most secure border in history,” “historic lows” — are consistent with that incentive and are repeated across official channels and supportive media [1] [10] [11]. Independent outlets such as the Christian Science Monitor and Pew have placed those CBP numbers in longer‑term context, showing large differences between administrations but also warning against overinterpretation without accounting for policy, enforcement and migratory push/pull factors [5] [12].
5. What remains uncertain or unverified in public reporting
Public releases and media analyses document the downward trajectory in CBP‑reported counts, but external verification is limited: researchers and journalists rely on CBP’s published operational statistics and occasional internal data shared with reporters, and the sources here do not include third‑party audits or uniformly comparable time‑series vetted by an independent statistical agency — so claims framed as absolute eradication of “gotaways” or near‑total declines need to be read as agency‑reported metrics rather than independently validated facts [4] [2].
6. Bottom line: numbers show large drops but accuracy depends on definitions and comparisons
CBP’s numbers under Trump, as reported by CBP and DHS, show large, sustained reductions in encounters and apprehensions relative to prior years and have been presented as proof of policy success [6] [3]. Independent fact‑checking and reporting demonstrate that some public claims cherry‑pick timeframes or mix metrics in ways that overstate the size of those declines, meaning the data are real but the political headlines about “95%” or “99.99%” drops are often driven by selective framing rather than straightforward, apples‑to‑apples measurement [4] [9] [5].