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Number of immigrants that came illegally to the US during Biden's
Executive Summary
The core claim — that “millions” of immigrants entered the United States without authorization during President Biden’s term — is supported by multiple official and oversight tallies, but the exact total depends on what is being counted (encounters, releases, removals, expulsions, or “gotaways”). DHS/CBP encounter-based aggregations produce multi‑million totals since January 2021, while alternative breakdowns that separate expulsions, removals, and known releases yield lower figures for people ultimately released into the interior; both approaches are used in public debate [1] [2] [3]. The most defensible statement: between roughly 4 million and over 10 million enforcement encounters or related events occurred during the Biden period, with precise totals varying by methodology and time window [2] [4] [3].
1. What proponents and critics actually claim — a map of competing big numbers
Advocates highlighting a “record” crisis aggregate all CBP encounter categories and related counts to produce the largest totals, citing figures like 8.2 million or 10.3 million+ encounters since early 2021; these tallies include Border Patrol plus Office of Field Operations encounters, recorded “gotaways,” and parole or CHNV admissions [1] [4] [3]. Fact‑checking and some DHS summaries caution that encounters are not a one‑to‑one count of unique people who settled in the U.S. because the same individual may be encountered multiple times and because many encounters result in expulsions or removals rather than interior releases [2] [5]. Both sides use official CBP-derived data but emphasize different categories to support divergent narratives [1] [2].
2. The official data picture — what CBP reports and where the numbers come from
CBP’s publicly released datasets classify contacts as Border Patrol apprehensions, Office of Field Operations inadmissibles, expulsions under Title 42 (where applicable), removals, releases, and administrative “gotaways” estimates; aggregating those figures across FY2021–FY2024 (and into FY2025 snapshots) yields totals cited by congressional fact sheets and CBP dashboards in the multi‑million range [3] [6] [5]. Independent fact‑checks have parsed those same data to produce alternative tallies: for example, one analysis subtracted removals and expulsions and combined known releases with an estimate of gotaways to arrive at about 4.2 million people who entered or were released into the country in a given window, noting that encounter totals (6.5 million in one slice) differ from net interior releases [2]. The difference is methodological, not necessarily contradictory.
3. Why “gotaways,” double‑counts, and expulsions matter — methodological fault lines
The largest numerical disputes hinge on three issues: [7] “gotaways” are estimated rather than individually documented, and CBP’s publicly cited totals sometimes exclude or include them depending on the report [4] [2]; [8] encounters can double‑count repeat crossers or multiple encounters with the same migrant before removal, inflating encounter totals relative to unique individuals [2]; and [9] expulsions and removals remove people from the U.S. short of “entering and remaining,” so including them in a headline total depends on how one defines “came illegally” [2] [5]. These definitional choices drive major public disagreements and produce non‑equivalent statistics used by policy actors and media.
4. Recent trends and snapshots that shape perception — peaks, troughs, and fiscal year totals
Monthly and fiscal year patterns matter for political framing: CBP reported monthly encounter peaks (e.g., months with 100k+ encounters) that critics highlight as unprecedented, and committee fact sheets reported nearly 3 million inadmissible encounters in FY2024 and over 10.8 million encounters since FY2021 in some aggregations [1] [3]. Conversely, other recent accounts point to periods of decline — for example, reported Border Patrol apprehensions falling in certain fiscal periods to historical lows — underscoring that annualized or rolling totals can paint different pictures depending on the chosen timeframe [10] [11]. These snapshots show the importance of time window selection when citing totals.
5. Bottom line for journalists and policymakers — a precise answer and a recommended framing
There is no single undisputed tally labeled “immigrants who came illegally under Biden” because official data support multiple valid counts depending on definitions: if counting all CBP encounters and related events, the total is in the multi‑millions (commonly reported as 8–11 million since early 2021); if counting people released into the interior after excluding removals/expulsions, the lower bound falls to roughly 4 million in some analyses [1] [2] [3]. Reporters and policymakers should state which metric they use (encounters, unique individuals, releases, or estimated gotaways), cite CBP data or independent fact‑checks, and avoid presenting any single number without that methodological context [2] [6].