How many illegal immigrants came into the country during trumps first term
Executive summary
There is no single, definitive tally of "how many illegal immigrants came into the country" during Donald Trump’s first term (January 2017–January 2021); official statistics track encounters, apprehensions, expulsions and removals, not a one-to-one count of unique people, and repeat crossings and unobserved "gotaways" make precise totals impossible to produce from public sources [1] [2]. Available government and research-based summaries point to roughly a bit more than one million apprehended border crossers during fiscal years 2017–2020, with significant caveats about repeat attempts, undetected entries and differing metrics used by agencies [3] [4] [1].
1. What the available numbers actually measure
Border enforcement agencies publish counts of "encounters" and "apprehensions"—events in which someone was stopped or processed—not unique individuals, and many migrants attempt to cross multiple times so encounters overstate the number of distinct people; migration-policy analysts and reporters stress that encounters can include repeat attempts and therefore cannot be simply summed to produce a net inflow figure [2] [1]. Scholars and fact‑checkers also note that monthly and annual apprehension totals fluctuate dramatically with policy, weather and regional conditions, which further complicates any single cumulative claim about "how many came in" [5] [4].
2. The rounded, documented totals for the Trump years
A congressional and DHS-linked summary cited in public reporting indicates about 1.1 million crossers entered during fiscal years 2017–2020 as recorded in DHS reporting of outcomes through January 2021; that figure is frequently invoked as the documented count of apprehended crossers in that span, but it reflects processed cases and not unique persons [3]. Independent fact‑checking and DHS datasets show the pattern of monthly apprehensions varied widely—after a pandemic low in April 2020, for example, apprehensions rose to roughly 71,000 in December 2020 and about 75,300 in January 2021—underscoring the large month‑to‑month swings within the overall period [4].
3. Deportations, expulsions and removals are a different tally
Deportation and expulsion totals are another related metric: if Title 42 expulsions and expedited removals are included, scholarly summaries put Trump‑era deportations/expulsions at about 393,000 in 2020 alone and show annual deportation totals peaking in some years [6]. These removal figures measure government actions to return people, not how many initially entered or remained; they can include people processed quickly at the border and do not equate to net changes in the unauthorized population [6].
4. Why a single "came into the country" number is misleading
Experts and reporters warn that summing encounters, gotaways and expulsions to claim a net inflow is misleading because of repeat crossings, multiple processing events for the same individuals, and unseen "gotaways"; the Migration Policy Institute and other analysts explicitly caution that encounter counts overstate unique arrivals and that the true change in the unauthorized population depends on emigration, naturalizations and removals as well as entries [2] [1]. Fact‑checkers also emphasize the need to distinguish between short‑term border activity and the longer run effect of administration policy on the unauthorized population [5] [4].
5. Verdict and reporting limitations
Based on public DHS‑linked reporting cited in oversight materials and mainstream fact‑checks, a reasonable, well‑qualified statement is that recorded apprehensions/crossers during FY2017–FY2020 totaled on the order of about 1.1 million processed border crossers, while deportations/expulsions in certain years reached into the hundreds of thousands [3] [6]; however, that does not answer how many distinct people "came into the country" or how many remained unlawfully, and existing sources do not provide a single authoritative count of unique arrivals across Trump’s first term [2] [7].