How do CBP 'encounters' differ from unique migrant entries, and how does that affect totals?
Executive summary
CBP “encounters” are an administrative tally that sums Border Patrol apprehensions, Office of Field Operations (OFO) inadmissibles, and Title 42 expulsions across ports, land and sea, not a headcount of unique people [1] [2] [3]. Because an “encounter” records interactions — including repeat contacts with the same person, presentation at ports of entry, and expulsions — totals can be substantially higher than the number of distinct migrants who entered or attempted to enter [4] [5].
1. What CBP means by “encounters” and what’s in the number
CBP’s public statistics define “encounters” as the aggregation of U.S. Border Patrol Title 8 apprehensions, OFO Title 8 inadmissibles, and Title 42 expulsions across nationwide, southwest and northern land border datasets, and those categories are explicitly included in agency dashboards [1] [6] [3]. The Office of Homeland Security Statistics (OHSS) treats the CBP Encounters Key Homeland Security Metric (KHSM) as “any encounter of a removable alien,” which reinforces that the metric records interactions rather than a deduplicated population count [5]. CBP also cautions that encounter data are drawn from live systems and are subject to revision, changes in definition, or pending review — meaning the same framework, not an absolute census, drives monthly and fiscal-year totals [1].
2. Why encounters are not the same as unique migrant entries
Independent reporting and Congressional analyses note plainly that encounter statistics count interactions and not unique individuals; a single person who is apprehended, expelled, reattempts crossing, and is apprehended again could appear in CBP’s encounter tally multiple times [4]. OFO “inadmissibles” are people who present at ports seeking admission but are deemed inadmissible or withdraw their application — these are encounters recorded at ports of entry and include people who may not have attempted an illegal crossing at all [1] [6]. Title 42 expulsions and USBP apprehensions are both folded into encounters since FY2020, further mixing enforcement outcomes into the single encounters stream [6] [7].
3. How policy and operational practices change encounter counts
Programmatic shifts and operational choices — for example, funneling migrants to ports via parole programs or appointment apps, or alternately increasing expulsions and turnbacks — change the composition and volume of encounters even if the underlying number of unique migrants is stable [8]. The same CBP and DHS dashboards that report “record-low encounters” as evidence of border control can reflect policy effects (e.g., more expulsions or port processing) as much as changes in migration drivers, a point underscored by agency messaging and partisan briefings alike [9] [10]. CBP’s own statistical notes warn that encounter categories began to include multiple authorities in March FY2020, making year-to-year comparisons sensitive to definitional shifts [6] [7].
4. The practical effect on headline totals and public debate
Because encounters can double-count repeat crossings, and because they bundle different kinds of contact (inadmissibles at airports/ports, Border Patrol apprehensions, expulsions), headline CBP totals typically overstate the number of distinct individuals who entered or tried to enter the United States in a given period — sometimes substantially, though available sources do not provide a consistent national deduplication rate [4] [5]. This aggregation has political consequences: administrations and oversight committees use encounters to claim border success or crisis, while analysts and NGOs often prefer more granular measures (OFO vs. USBP, expulsions vs. apprehensions, and country-of-origin breakdowns) to assess trends [8] [11].
5. What the sources do and do not allow analysts to conclude
CBP and OHSS documentation make clear how encounters are constructed and that they are the authoritative operational metric for DHS reporting, but they do not publish a single, authoritative conversion from encounters to unique individuals nationwide; CRS and other analysts therefore emphasize that encounters measure interactions and not people [5] [4]. Secondary publications quoting annual encounter aggregates (for example, roughly 444,000 encounters in a fiscal year reported by federal commentary) illustrate scale but cannot, from the sources provided, be translated into a precise count of distinct migrants without further CBP microdata or deduplication analyses [12].