Did most of the 2.4 million immigrants that Biden let cross the boarder in his four year come rom jails, mental institutions, or insane asylums?
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Executive summary
There is no evidence that “most” of the roughly 2.4 million people counted in several headline metrics as entering or being encountered under the Biden administration came from jails, mental institutions, or “insane asylums”; official data show only a small fraction had recorded criminal convictions and available reporting does not support claims about mass releases from psychiatric facilities [1] [2] [3]. Much of the confusion arises from conflating “encounters” with net new residents, counting repeat crossings, and the politicized retelling of raw border statistics [4] [5] [3].
1. What the claim actually asserts and why it matters
The claim being examined is that most of the roughly 2.4 million migrants “let in” during Biden’s term came straight from jails, mental institutions, or “insane asylums,” an allegation that implies organized mass releases and public-safety or public-health threats; this is testable against government encounter, release, and criminal-record summaries but requires careful interpretation because public figures often use different baselines (encounters, releases, net population) [1] [4].
2. What the federal data actually show about criminal convictions
U.S. Border Patrol and related processing data show that only a small proportion of migrants encountered had prior criminal convictions when checked against law‑enforcement databases: for one sample of 1.5 million apprehensions where checks were possible, about 15,608 had prior convictions, most commonly immigration-related offenses, DUI, or drug possession/trafficking—not a mass of recently released prisoners [2]. ICE’s broader database lists hundreds of thousands of noncitizens with criminal convictions, but that is not evidence those convictions were the origin point immediately before their border crossing, nor that they represent “most” of the people encountered [2] [6].
3. What the record says (and does not say) about psychiatric institutions
None of the reporting in the assembled sources documents an influx of migrants coming en masse from psychiatric hospitals or “insane asylums.” Major fact‑checks and policy analyses focus on encounters, expulsions, releases, and criminal-record checks rather than on origin-point medical institutional releases, and none provide statistics supporting the claim that most arrivals were recently institutionalized for mental illness [5] [4] [3]. Reporting that touches on background checks for regulated parole programs (for countries like Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela) describes vetting, not wholesale transfers from psychiatric facilities [7].
4. Why figures about “2.4 million” or “millions” are easily misread
Key reporting repeatedly warns that “encounters” are not the same as unique people successfully settling in the U.S.: encounters count stops, detections and repeat crossings and include many expulsions or returns, and federal tallies show millions were expelled or returned under policies like Title 42 and other enforcement actions [4] [1] [8]. Independent analysts and fact-checkers emphasize that raw encounter totals have been mischaracterized as net increases in unauthorized residents, which inflates the apparent scale and can be used to justify alarming narrative frames [5] [3].
5. Political narratives, sources of confusion, and what is provable
Partisan and advocacy actors have presented the same datasets in divergent ways—Republican committees and opinion writers often frame encounter totals as “let in,” while fact‑checkers and migration researchers underscore returns, repeat crossers, and distinctions between encounters and net population change [9] [10] [1]. The assembled sources document increased encounters and significant administrative releases in processing, but they do not substantiate the specific allegation that most arrivals were recent inmates of jails or psychiatric hospitals [8] [1] [3].
6. Bottom line
Available government statistics and reputable fact‑checks show only a small fraction of processed migrants had criminal convictions in checks cited by reporters and no sourced evidence links the majority of those counted to jails or psychiatric institutions; the claim that “most” came from jails or “insane asylums” is unsupported by the reporting provided and appears to be a mischaracterization driven by conflating encounter totals, repeat crossings, and partisan framing [2] [4] [5].