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Fact check: How many immigrants entered illegally under trump in 2016-2020
Executive Summary
From official U.S. Border Patrol data, there were roughly 2.40 million encounters/apprehensions along the border during fiscal years 2016–2020, but that figure is not a precise count of individuals who “entered illegally” because encounters can include repeated apprehensions of the same person and do not capture all illegal entries [1]. Independent population estimates and DHS statistics show the undocumented population edged around 10–11 million during this period, but those figures do not translate into a straight tally of new illegal entries tied to the Trump years. Multiple datasets and analyses highlight a 2019 spike in apprehensions, policy-driven changes in enforcement and asylum processing, and important limitations in how “illegal entry” is measured and reported [2] [3] [1].
1. What the Border Patrol numbers actually show — a big spike, not a headcount of new arrivals
U.S. Border Patrol published yearly apprehension totals for fiscal years 2016–2020 showing 415,816 [4], 310,531 [5], 404,142 [6], 859,501 [7], and 405,036 [8], which sum to about 2,395,026 apprehensions over the five-year span. These are official encounter counts and reflect Border Patrol activity, not unique persons or confirmed unlawful entries. Apprehensions can include people encountered multiple times, family units processed differently, and migrants turned back under specific policies, so equating apprehensions to the number of people who “entered illegally” inflates the implication if presented as unique new entrants [1]. Analysts and agencies treat apprehensions as an enforcement metric rather than a definitive migration inflow statistic.
2. Why population estimates don’t resolve the “how many entered” question
DHS and demography-focused organizations provide stock estimates of the unauthorized resident population — roughly 10.5 million in January 2020 per Homeland Security Statistics and similar ranges from research groups — but these are aggregated totals that mix long-settled undocumented residents, legal status changes, return migration, and new arrivals [3] [9]. These snapshots cannot be used to back-calculate a precise count of illegal entries during 2016–2020 because they omit turnover, emigration, and differences in methodology across estimates. Some groups estimate year-to-year changes, but those figures vary; for example, the Center for Immigration Studies produced alternate totals that differ by hundreds of thousands, illustrating how methodological choices drive different narratives [10].
3. The policy and enforcement context that shaped numbers during the Trump years
Multiple sources document significant policy shifts under the Trump administration — prosecutions of family units, asylum restrictions, and operational changes — that affected encounter counts and migrant behavior. A March 2020 review noted the large 2019 rise in apprehensions, driven in part by Central American migration patterns, while advocacy and academic analyses later highlighted releases and prosecutorial decisions that critics argue affected incentives and criminal recidivism among some crossers [2] [11]. Those policy changes altered how encounters were recorded and processed, meaning year-to-year comparisons reflect both changes in migrant flows and administrative practices. Interpreting totals without that context risks attributing all change to migration alone rather than to policy-driven measurement effects.
4. Conflicting narratives and what each source emphasizes
Think tanks and policy groups emphasize different aspects: enforcement-focused datasets present Border Patrol apprehensions and criminal-alien enforcement as metrics of border activity, while other organizations focus on unauthorized population estimates to argue for or against migration trends. For example, one analysis highlighted that nearly 58,184 noncitizens with criminal records were released during a Trump-era policy episode and argued this affected criminal crossings, whereas Border Patrol numbers emphasize the sheer volume of 2019 encounters as a spike year [11] [2]. These divergent emphases reveal competing narratives: one frames the period as enforcement success or failure based on arrests and releases, the other frames it as a humanitarian and demographic story based on population estimates [1] [3].
5. Bottom line for the original question and unresolved caveats
The best, authoritative public answer is that about 2.40 million Border Patrol apprehensions occurred in FY2016–FY2020, but that is not equivalent to a definitive count of people who entered illegally during the Trump administration because apprehensions double-count repeat crossers and do not include undetected entries or legal crossings later converted to unauthorized presence [1] [3]. Population estimates around 10–11 million establish the scale of the undocumented population but cannot be parsed into year-by-year illegal-entry totals without strong, often unavailable assumptions [3] [9]. Any claim that provides a single “how many entered illegally” number for 2016–2020 must therefore be treated as an approximation contingent on how one defines and counts “entries,” a limitation reflected across the sources reviewed [1] [10].