How many crossed the border illegally under Trump
Executive summary
The government does not publish a definitive count of how many people “crossed the border illegally and remained” during Donald Trump’s presidency; the clearest official metrics are encounters or apprehensions recorded by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which show substantial variation across Trump’s first term and the early months of his second term as reported by federal agencies and independent analysts [1]. During Trump’s first term, CBP recorded spikes and troughs — for example 851,508 apprehensions in fiscal 2019 and monthly highs of roughly 70–75 thousand apprehensions at the end of his first term — while reporting around 7,287 encounters in his first week in office — all of which are imperfect proxies for “how many crossed” because they count encounters, repeat attempts and do not measure net stays [2] [3] [4] [1].
1. What the official numbers actually measure: apprehensions and encounters, not net entries
Federal agencies track “encounters” and “apprehensions,” not the net number of people who successfully entered and stayed in the United States undetected; CBP’s encounter figures and ICE’s arrest and removal statistics are the primary public data points, but they can include repeat crossings by the same person or multiple encounters for one attempt, and they omit “gotaways” who are not stopped — a limitation repeatedly noted by reporters and analysts [1] [2].
2. The headline figures from Trump’s first term: big swings and a notable 2019 peak
During Trump’s first term, CBP reported 851,508 apprehensions in fiscal year 2019 — more than double the prior year’s 396,579 — and by late 2020 monthly apprehensions were high, with December 2020 at 71,141 and January 2021 at 75,316, figures used by fact‑checkers to correct some campaign claims [2] [3]. Analysts note that those totals were still below early‑2000s peaks and that seasonal and policy-driven patterns complicate simple “more or less” narratives [2] [5].
3. Early Trump administration and surge dynamics: immediate drops then rebounds
Trump’s first days in office saw a sharp immediate drop in recorded encounters (7,287 in his first seven days, per contemporaneous reporting), but that early decline gave way to month‑to‑month rises later in the term, with migration patterns described by fact‑checkers and scholars as responsive to seasonality, regional conditions and policy shifts rather than a single administration action alone [4] [5].
4. The second‑term claims and low‑encounter months: official boasts and data caveats
After Trump returned to office in 2025, the administration and DHS publicly pointed to record low single‑day and monthly encounter numbers — examples include daily lows cited by DHS and a June month with 6,070 encounters claimed by the White House — and communications touting “historically low” crossings and large numbers of arrests and deportations in early months; these are agency counts of encounters and arrests and have been amplified in White House messaging [6] [7] [8]. Independent outlets and the monitoring press note that such figures reflect enforcement activity and do not resolve how many people ultimately remain undetected inside the country [9] [1].
5. Bottom line and the unavoidable uncertainty
Answering “how many crossed the border illegally under Trump” therefore requires caveats: official CBP encounters and apprehensions give specific counts (for example 851,508 apprehensions in FY2019 and month‑end counts around 71–75k in late 2020) but they are not the same as a net inflow figure and can both undercount (gotaways) and overcount (repeat encounters) actual unique entrants; independent reporting and fact‑checking consistently stress this data limitation and warn against reading encounters as the number of distinct people who entered and remained [2] [3] [1].