Fact check: What are the official statistics on border crossings during the Biden presidency?

1. Claim roundup — What supporters and critics say about the numbers

Advocates and critics both lean on official encounter counts but emphasize different frames: Republican briefings highlight the cumulative toll—over 10.3 million encounters and 8.3 million at the Southwest border—to argue a border “crisis” under the Biden administration, while news organizations and research centers emphasize recent declines from record highs as evidence of policy effects ^{[1] [4] [2]}. Independent fact-checkers note that both sides use the same data but select different slices—cumulative totals versus recent monthly trends—to support competing narratives. The data therefore support two concurrent facts: very large cumulative encounters since 2021 and a marked drop in encounters after late 2023 and into 2024–25 ^{[1] [2] [4]}.

2. Where the official numbers come from and how to access them

Primary official statistics on border encounters come from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) via the CBP Public Data Portal and monthly operational updates, which publish encounter counts, Southwest border metrics, and specialized datasets like rescues and mortality data ^[5]. CBP’s monthly updates also report encounters between ports of entry—commonly called “gotaways” or between-POE encounters—along with apprehensions and expulsions; these monthly releases are the authoritative source for current counts and trends. Analysts emphasize that CBP releases are the base dataset used by Congress, media, and research groups to produce both cumulative totals and month-by-month analyses ^{[5] [3]}.

3. The headline totals — millions of encounters over four years

House committee fact sheets and CBP totals add up to more than 10 million nationwide encounters during the Biden presidency, with over 8.3 million encounters at the Southwest border and hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied children encountered since 2021, figures frequently cited in congressional materials and advocacy reports ^[1]. These aggregated numbers are useful for understanding the scale of migration management demands over the administration’s term, but they combine different operational categories—apprehensions, encounters, expulsions and releases—so interpretation requires attention to what each count represents ^[1].

4. The more recent story — steep declines after late 2023

Independent analyses show a pronounced decline in monthly Border Patrol encounters in 2024: Pew reported a 77% drop from December 2023’s 249,741 encounters to 58,038 in August 2024, and media reporting noted September 2024 as a low point in the Biden term with roughly 54,000 apprehensions recorded that month—about an 80% fall from December highs ^{[2] [4]}. CBP’s own monthly updates through early 2025 continued to show dramatic month-to-month reductions in southwest border encounters, with February 2025 figures described as a 94% drop from February 2024 in one update ^{[3] [2]}. These declines coincide with policy shifts, bilateral cooperation, and operational changes.

5. Why totals and trends can be presented very differently

Different actors emphasize different statistics to support policy arguments: cumulative encounter totals underline long-term resource and humanitarian pressures, while monthly declines are used to argue that policy adjustments and enforcement are working. Data categories also matter: “encounters” are broader than “apprehensions” and include multiple contacts with the same person, expulsions under Title 42, and people processed at ports of entry, which can inflate cumulative counts relative to unique migrants. Critics and proponents sometimes omit these technical distinctions in public claims, producing misleading impressions despite using the same underlying CBP data ^{[1] [5]}.

6. What the CBP monthly updates actually show and their limits

CBP monthly updates provide near real-time operational statistics—apprehensions, encounters between ports, expulsions, and removals—and the agency’s data portal allows researchers to download line-level data for independent analysis ^{[5] [3]}. However, CBP releases do not always reconcile duplicates or provide unique individual counts, and datasets vary in definitions over time, complicating direct cumulative summation across years without methodological adjustment. Analysts relying on CBP data therefore must document how they handle repeat encounters and category changes to avoid overstating unique-person totals ^{[5] [3]}.

7. Missing context, policy drivers, and what to watch next

The primary omitted elements in many public claims are policy changes (domestic and Mexican/Guatemalan/Regional), legal pathways restored or created, asylum processing backlogs, and seasonal migration patterns, all of which materially affect monthly encounters; migration policy scholars stress that recent declines reflect a blend of enforcement, bilateral agreements, and reduced flows from specific origin countries ^{[6] [7]}. For a clear, consistent answer about “official statistics,” researchers should cite CBP’s Public Data Portal and monthly CBP releases for the chosen metric (encounters, apprehensions, unique persons), and explicitly state whether they report cumulative encounters or unique individuals—because both are defensible but tell different stories ^{[5] [7]}.