How many unaccompanied children did US authorities encounter at the southwest border in 2024 and 2025?
Executive summary
Official public reporting of unaccompanied children (UAC) encountered at the U.S. southwest land border in 2024 and 2025 is dispersed across monthly CBP releases, Congressional research summaries, and advocacy or partisan fact sheets, and the available excerpts supplied here do not contain a single, definitive year-end total for either calendar 2024 or calendar/Fiscal Year 2025; a reliable composite must therefore flag inconsistent figures and rely on the CBP monthly counts that are explicitly cited in these sources (for example, November 2024: 6,463 UAC) while noting broader, conflicting tallies from other reports [1] [2] [3].
1. What the question really asks and what the sources actually show
The user seeks a straightforward count — how many unaccompanied children U.S. authorities encountered at the southwest border in 2024 and 2025 — but the federal data system reports encounters in multiple overlapping ways (Border Patrol apprehensions, OFO inadmissibles, Title 42 expulsions, and fiscal-year versus calendar reporting), and the supplied sources include monthly CBP statements, a Congressional Research Service summary, and outside analysis that offer partial or conflicting snapshots rather than a single authoritative annual total [4] [5] [2].
2. Verified datapoints available in the record provided
A CBP-based fact sheet cited by the House Homeland Security Committee reports that CBP encountered 6,463 unaccompanied children at the southwest border in November 2024, a concrete monthly count directly attributed to CBP in that factsheet [1]. The CBP monthly release for June 2024 notes a 14% month‑to‑month decline in UAC encounters compared with May 2024, demonstrating month-level volatility and confirming CBP’s practice of publishing monthly operational statistics [6]. CBP’s November 2024 monthly update likewise reports month-to-month changes — including only a 2% decrease in UACs from October to November — underscoring that monthly figures are the building blocks of any annual total [7].
3. What Congressional research and long-form reporting add — and their limits
A Congressional Research Service overview compiled historical UAC data and reports that UAC encounters numbered 2,964 in FY2022, 5,756 in FY2023, and 8,879 in the first ten months of FY2024 in the specific tabulation that the CRS provided in the excerpt; that figure is an explicit data point but covers only the first ten months of FY2024 and therefore is not a full-year total [2]. CRS reporting is authoritative on definitions and trends, but the excerpt here stops short of giving a final FY2024 or FY2025 annual count [2].
4. Conflicting tallies and why they diverge
Outside analysis cited here makes a very different claim — that “nearly 100,000 UACs were apprehended at the Southwest border in FY 2024” — a figure that does not align with the monthly snapshots and partial-year totals in the official-material excerpts provided and which appears in a commentary piece rather than a CBP or CRS data product [3]. That discrepancy illustrates two hazards: partisan or analytic amplification of select datasets, and the multiple ways “encounter” or “apprehension” can be counted in DHS reporting (Title 8 vs Title 42, at-port vs between-ports, fiscal-year vs calendar-year) [5] [4].
5. The honest answer based on the supplied reporting
From the supplied sources, an exact, single annual total for UAC encounters at the southwest border for all of calendar 2024 or for calendar/FY2025 cannot be conclusively extracted: the record includes a CBP monthly count for November 2024 of 6,463 UACs [1], a CRS partial FY2024 tally of 8,879 UACs for the first ten months of FY2024 [2], and CBP monthly trend statements showing declines or small month‑to‑month changes [6] [7], but no complete year-end totals are present in the provided excerpts to definitively answer “how many” for the full years 2024 and 2025 [4] [8]. Where outside analyses provide very large alternative numbers (e.g., “nearly 100,000”), those claims are not corroborated by the specific CBP or CRS excerpts supplied and therefore should be treated as contested unless verified against CBP’s published southwest land border encounter tables [3] [4].
6. How to get a conclusive figure and what to watch for
To produce an unambiguous annual count, consult CBP’s Southwest Land Border Encounters tables and the Nationwide Encounters FY pages, and reconcile Title 8 vs Title 42 categorizations and fiscal-year vs calendar-year framing; the CBP webpages referenced in the supplied material are the original sources of monthly and annual encounter tables [4] [8], and any final total should cite the CBP southwest-sector encounter table or a complete CBP year-end report rather than commentary or truncated CRS excerpts.