How many illegal aliens during Trump administration
Executive summary
The number of people in the United States without authorization during the Trump administration is not a single settled figure in the public record; estimates and counts vary by metric — apprehensions at the border, deportations/removals, and population estimates — and the available reporting shows contested, changing totals rather than one definitive count [1] [2] [3]. Major data points include large numbers of border encounters and apprehensions during Trump’s first term, government tallies of deportations and removals, and later population estimates that experts disagree about [4] [1] [3].
1. What the official enforcement numbers say: arrests, removals and deportations
Federal enforcement statistics and news analyses show large enforcement activity under Trump but do not equate directly to a static count of who was in the country; the New York Times’ analysis of federal data finds roughly 230,000 deportations from interior arrests and about 270,000 deportations at the border over the period it examined, giving a sense of the scale of removals rather than the total undocumented population [1]. ICE and DHS statements during Trump’s second term tout tens of thousands removed in short windows — ICE said more than 65,000 removals in the first 100 days of the administration and the White House claimed 32,809 ICE arrests in the first 50 days — figures that document enforcement output but not net population totals [5] [6].
2. Border encounters and apprehensions: spikes, dips and interpretation
Border apprehension data under Trump’s first term show volatility: the Pew Research summary records 851,508 apprehensions in fiscal year 2019 and other sources record monthly apprehensions that rose from pandemic lows to tens of thousands by late 2020, with December 2020 and January 2021 each showing roughly 71,000–75,000 apprehensions — metrics of enforcement encounters, not steady-state population counts [2] [7]. Newsweek and other aggregations compare encounter totals across years (for example 1.4 million encounters in 2019 at the high point of Trump’s first term), underscoring how yearly flows differed from cumulative or resident population figures [4].
3. Population estimates: experts disagree and definitions matter
Population-level estimates of unauthorized immigrants depend on methodology and timing; Pew’s later reporting shows a record 14 million unauthorized immigrants in 2023, and analysts differ on whether Trump-era enforcement began to shrink or merely shift the composition of that population, with demographers, think tanks and the administration offering divergent assessments [3] [1]. Cato’s analysis argues that Trump reduced legal immigration but did not reduce the unauthorized population and even describes a “stabilization” of that population during his first term, highlighting that legal inflows and interior enforcement moves complicate population totals [8].
4. Competing claims, political framing and what’s missing
Competing political claims — DHS and White House tallies of millions “having left” versus independent analyses that find smaller net declines — illustrate how enforcement numbers are mobilized for narrative effect while independent estimates remain cautious; for example, DHS-linked reports claimed 2.5 million left in one period, but independent outlets and demographers flagged methodological uncertainty about self‑deportation estimates [9] [1]. The sources provided document removals, arrests and apprehensions but do not produce a single authoritative headcount of “how many illegal aliens” were present at any fixed point during the Trump administration, and they underscore that definitions (unauthorized, undocumented, removed, encountered) and timing are decisive for any answer [1] [3] [2].
5. Bottom line
The public record assembled by federal agencies and independent analysts yields clear, large numbers for enforcement actions — hundreds of thousands of deportations and removals and, in high-flow years, hundreds of thousands to over a million border encounters — but it does not converge in the provided reporting on one definitive total of undocumented people “during the Trump administration”; population estimates vary and depend on method and cutpoints, with both enforcement tallies and independent population studies necessary to understand the full picture [1] [2] [3].