How many illegal immigrants came into one US during President Biden administration
Executive summary
There is no single, uncontested tally of how many people “came into” the United States illegally during the Biden administration because agencies and analysts report different metrics (encounters, gotaways, parolees, removals) that overlap and double‑count individuals; published figures range from several million to more than ten million depending on the measure used [1] [2] [3]. Short answer: government and independent reports document millions of border “encounters” and parole admissions since January 2021, but those encounter counts are not equivalent to unique new residents and cannot be converted into a precise count of distinct unauthorized arrivals without further assumptions [1] [4].
1. What official “encounters” and congressional tallies show
Customs and Border Protection and congressional offices have published encounter-based sums that add up to many millions: a House Homeland Security fact sheet cited roughly 10.8 million total encounters since FY2021 through late 2024 (including inadmissible encounters) [2], Senate and House Republicans have highlighted figures such as “more than 7.8 million” logged illegal border crossings plus an estimated 1.5 million “gotaways” that were detected by technology but not apprehended [3], and other GOP analyses have presented 6.7 million alleged new inadmissible entrants over specific periods [5]; these are different ways of counting activity at the border, not direct counts of distinct people.
2. Why “encounters” exaggerate the count of unique arrivals
DHS and researchers emphasize that one person can appear in the data multiple times (recidivism), that “encounters” include people who were immediately returned or expelled, and that some encounters were lawful port‑of‑entry asylum appointments rather than clandestine crossings — all factors that inflate raw encounter totals relative to the number of unique people who took up residence [4] [1]. For example, FactCheck noted DHS data showing millions of encounters with roughly 2.5 million releases into the U.S. and about 2.8 million removals/expulsions during a specified window, highlighting how processing outcomes vary and complicate a straight summation of encounters into “entered” people [1].
3. Parole programs, repatriations and net population changes matter
The Biden administration used parole pathways for some nationalities — CHNV parole admitted roughly 160,000 people by mid‑2023 before the program was suspended — which are legal admissions counted differently from irregular border crossings [6]. Meanwhile, Migration Policy and DHS data show the administration has carried out millions of repatriations and expulsions (Migration Policy put combined returns and removals at about 4.4 million over a period) so enforcement actions remove many people the encounter totals include [7]. These programmatic and enforcement flows mean that encounter totals do not equal the net increase in the undocumented resident population [6] [7].
4. Independent estimates of the undocumented population give context
Rather than trying to convert encounters to unique arrivals, demographers look at the undocumented resident population: Pew’s analysis found a record 14 million unauthorized immigrants living in the U.S. in 2023, a level driven in part by arrivals and by policy changes including parole programs [6]. The Center for Migration Studies offered lower estimates of the resident unauthorized population in other analyses [4], underscoring that population‑level estimates remain the most reliable snapshot of how many unauthorized people are actually residing in the country versus how many times migrants were encountered at the border.
5. Bottom line — a range and the key caveats
Depending on which metric is cited, aggregate encounter totals since January 2021 have been reported in the single‑millions to low‑double‑millions (examples: roughly 6.5 million encounters in one DHS summary window, to roughly 10.8 million encounters cited by congressional Republicans), but those figures cannot be read as precise counts of unique illegal entrants because of repeat crossings, returns/expulsions, legal parole admissions, and methodological differences across sources [1] [2] [3]. The most defensible, evidence‑based statement is that millions of unauthorized entries and admissions occurred during the Biden presidency and that the undocumented resident population rose to a record level by 2023 — but claims that tens of millions of distinct people “entered illegally” under Biden are not supported by the underlying data without problematic assumptions [6] [1] [5].