Fact check: How many undocumented immigrants entered the US during the Biden administration?

1. The Big Number Everyone Quotes—and What It Actually Means

Media and policy discussions commonly cite the 7.2 million figure for January 2021–January 2024, which aggregates Border Patrol encounters and is used to represent the scale of border activity under the Biden administration. That statistic comes from official encounter tallies and was summarized in recent policy overviews; however, the figure counts encounters not unique entrants, and federal datasets separately track Title 8 apprehensions, Title 8 inadmissibles and Title 42 expulsions, which overlap and cannot simply be summed to represent individual crossings ^{[1] [2]}. This distinction matters because one person can be encountered multiple times, and the published tallies intentionally exclude migrants who evaded detection entirely—known as “gotaways”—so the 7.2 million number both understates total attempted crossings (by excluding gotaways) and overstates unique entrants (by counting repeat encounters) ^[1].

2. Data Sources and How Border Officials Record Events

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reports break activity into categories—U.S. Border Patrol apprehensions, Office of Field Operations inadmissibles, and expulsions under Title 42—and the public datasets issued in 2025 mirror that structure. The “Nationwide Encounters” and “Southwest Land Border Encounters” releases provide monthly breakdowns by demographic groups such as single adults, family units, and unaccompanied children, but they do not equate to an official count of newly arrived undocumented immigrants who successfully entered and remained in the country ^{[2] [3]}. Analysts therefore must treat encounter totals as operational metrics that show pressure on border systems rather than clean counts of net migration.

3. Recent Trends Show Sharp Declines in 2025—but Interpretation Varies

CBP’s monthly updates for 2025 show steep declines in recorded encounters, with July 2025 cited as the lowest monthly total in CBP history (24,628 encounters) and April 2025 showing southwest Border Patrol apprehensions of 8,383, a 93% drop from April 2024 figures cited in agency releases ^{[4] [5]}. Those recent declines are presented by federal officials as evidence the border is more secure; however, critics note that monthly fluctuations reflect policy changes, enforcement operations, and seasonal migration patterns, not a single causal factor. Thus, while the trend lines in 2025 point downward, the implications for cumulative counts of undocumented entrants during the entire administration remain constrained by earlier higher-volume years and by data-definition issues ^{[4] [5]}.

4. Policy Actions Changed the Counting Environment

White House actions and executive directives in 2025 adjusted asylum eligibility and expanded authorities for removal, altering who is recorded as an “encounter” versus expelled or inadmissible ^[6]. These policy shifts matter for headline totals because changing the legal framework changes how many interactions are logged under different statutory categories; for example, broader use of expulsions reduces formal entries while increasing expulsions in the dataset. Analysts trying to estimate “people who entered and remained” must therefore account for policy-driven reclassifications and not treat raw encounter counts as a stable measure across years ^[6].

5. Why a Single definitive number is not available from these sources

The compiled sources explicitly illustrate the methodological gap: public CBP releases are comprehensive about encounters but do not reconcile duplicates, gotaways, or post‑encounter outcomes (release, removal, detention, asylum processing). The datasets referenced here ^{[2] [3] [1]} therefore allow multiple plausible estimates but not a precise tally of unique undocumented immigrants who entered during the Biden years. Any attempt to present a single number would require assumptions—about repeat crossings, gotaway counts, and post‑encounter legal outcomes—not documented in the supplied materials ^{[2] [1]}.

6. Conflicting narratives and their likely agendas

Political actors use the encounter totals to advance differing messages: opponents highlight the multi‑million encounter totals to argue for border failure, while the administration and CBP emphasize recent 2025 declines to claim improved control and security ^{[1] [4]}. Both arguments rely on selective interpretation of the same encounter datasets—either aggregating early high-volume years or accentuating later drops—so readers should recognize that the same underlying data can be framed to support competing policy claims without contradicting the raw encounter records ^{[1] [4]}.

7. Bottom line for the question you asked

Based solely on the provided sources, the best evidence is that the Biden administration saw millions of border encounters—most prominently the 7.2 million figure for Jan 2021–Jan 2024—but no single, verifiable count of unique undocumented immigrants who entered and remained is reported in these datasets because of repeat encounters, excluded “gotaways,” and shifting policy categories. To move from encounter totals to a defensible unique‑person estimate would require additional data or methodology not present in the supplied materials ^{[1] [2]}.