How many illegal immigrants came to the US during Biden administration
Executive summary
There is no single, unambiguous tally of “how many illegal immigrants came to the U.S. during the Biden administration”; available government encounter counts, removals, releases and population estimates produce overlapping but different snapshots—encounters measured in the millions, releases and removals in the low millions, and the unauthorized resident population estimated at a record 14 million by 2023 [1] [2] [3]. Claims of 20 million or more new illegal entrants under Biden are contradicted or deemed exaggerated by multiple fact-checks and demographic studies [4] [3].
1. What the government encounter numbers show: millions of “encounters,” not admissions
Customs and Border Protection encounter tallies and congressional summaries count “encounters” at the border—interactions that include apprehensions, expulsions, and people processed and turned back—and these add up to very large values: one House factsheet cited roughly 10.8 million total encounters since FY2021, and Border Patrol data recorded more than 7.2 million southwest border crossings confirmed between January 2021 and January 2024 [1] [5]. Encounters are an operational measure of border activity, not a direct count of people permanently admitted to the U.S., and “gotaways” and repeated attempts by the same individuals can also inflate encounter totals [1] [5].
2. Releases, removals and repatriations—two sides of the ledger
DHS lifecycle and enforcement spreadsheets show that in initial processing millions were either removed or released: FactCheck reported roughly 2.5 million people released into the U.S. and 2.8 million removed or expelled in the early Biden years, while migration-policy analyses count nearly 4.4 million repatriations and related returns across the administration—numbers that reflect active enforcement as well as policy choices about whom to detain, remove or parole [2] [6]. Those figures demonstrate that sizable flows produced both large removals and substantial releases; neither figure alone equals the total number of people who “came” to live in the United States.
3. Unauthorized resident-population estimates capture net change, not flows
Demographic estimates look at the stock of unauthorized residents rather than annual flows or encounters; Pew Research Center reported the unauthorized immigrant population reached a record 14 million in 2023, up from earlier estimates, which combines arrivals, births to unauthorized parents, departures, and removals into a single population snapshot [3]. Because population estimates incorporate both inflows and outflows—plus methodological adjustments—an increase in population under Biden does not directly equate to a precise count of arrivals during his term, and different research groups use different baseline estimates and methods [3].
4. Politically charged alternative tallies and their limits
Several advocacy, congressional and think-tank reports give alternative totals—examples include a widely cited claim of 6.7 million new unauthorized migrants since 2021 from a conservative witness and reports from groups like the Heritage Foundation and America First Policy that present multi-million figures—yet these sources use different definitions (encounters, residencies, or paroled arrivals), selective time windows, or extrapolations that produce divergent results [7] [8] [9]. Independent analysts and fact-checkers have repeatedly warned that headline claims such as “20 million” are exaggerations unsupported by public data [4] [2].
5. Bottom line and reporting limits: give precise context, not a single number
The most defensible way to answer “how many illegal immigrants came” is to triangulate: border encounters since FY2021 number in the multiple millions (roughly 7–11 million depending on the measure used) [5] [1], initial DHS processing shows roughly 2.5 million released and about 2.8 million removed or expelled in early processing windows [2], repatriations total roughly 4.4 million by some counts [6], and the unauthorized resident population was estimated at about 14 million in 2023 [3]. Given different metrics, repeated attempts, and methodological differences, no single-source figure can definitively answer the exact number of unique people who entered illegally and remained in the U.S. during the Biden presidency; the data support a range of millions, not the tens of millions claimed in some political narratives [4] [1] [3] [2].