How many illegals crossed the border under Biden

1. What the official numbers actually measure: “encounters,” not unique people

U.S. Customs and Border Protection reports “encounters” — each time someone is stopped, processed, or detected — and congressional and administration tallies focus on those encounter totals, which reached multi‑millions during the Biden years (examples cited by House and Senate Republicans show figures like 7.8 million and other trackers claim totals exceeding 8 million or more) ^{[3] [4] [5]}.

2. How encounter totals have been used and sometimes inflated

Multiple fact‑checking and migration analysts caution that counting encounters as people overstates the number who entered and settled because encounters include repeat crossers, people returned to Mexico or expelled, and lawful admissions via port‑of‑entry appointments that CBP still records as encounters ^{[6] [1] [2]}.

3. Returns, removals and releases: the other halves of the ledger

Department of Homeland Security and independent analyses show that millions of encounters resulted in returns or removals; CMS noted that over four million encountered migrants were returned and that roughly 20–25 percent of encounters are repeat attempts, while FactCheck.org summarized DHS figures indicating about 2.5 million people were released into the U.S. and about 2.8 million removed or expelled in the early Biden years — demonstrating large movement in and out rather than a single inbound total ^{[2] [1]}.

4. Competing tallies from partisan offices and what they emphasize

Republican congressional offices and some senators have highlighted totals such as “more than 7.8 million” encounters plus “gotaways” and have added estimates for detected-but-not-apprehended migrants to reach higher figures, framing the data as a border crisis ^{[3] [5]}. Conservative advocacy sites and Republican reports emphasize net releases or alleged “additional” illegal entries to criticize policy, while administration communications point to operational differences, expulsions, and policy changes that complicate direct comparisons ^{[4] [7]}.

5. Independent estimates of the undocumented population versus border encounters

Nonpartisan researchers produce different measures: Pew and the Center for Migration Studies estimate the undocumented population in the U.S. in the low‑ to mid‑tens of millions, with Pew reporting a record high near 14 million in 2023 and CMS using census and ACS data to estimate about 10.9 million residents without authorization — figures that are not direct tallies of border crossings during a single presidential term but rather snapshots of the stock of people residing in the country ^{[6] [2]}.

6. The honest answer: no single definitive number of unique illegal entrants under Biden

Given the way federal data are collected — encounters that count events, not unique persons — combined with large numbers of returns, removals, repeated crossings, and political actors emphasizing different metrics, the evidence does not produce a single, verifiable count of “how many illegals crossed the border under Biden”; the usable, cited facts are that encounter tallies number in the multiple millions (reports cite figures ranging from roughly 7.8 million to more than 10 million encounters through FY2024), but a meaningful, unique‑person total is not available from the sources provided ^{[3] [4] [5] [1] [2]}.

7. Read the incentives: why numbers diverge

Advocates and partisan offices use selective metrics to support policy arguments — Republicans tend to aggregate encounters, gotaways, and released numbers to emphasize scale while fact‑checkers and migration researchers stress returns and repeat crossings to temper those totals; both approaches are factual about parts of the record but tell different stories depending on whether the goal is to measure enforcement workload, net inflows, or resident undocumented population ^{[3] [2] [1]}.