Is this true?: Red State Texas has 2.1M undocumented immigrants. Red State Florida has 1.6M. Blue State Minnesota has 130,000. Don't let anyone tell you this is about immigration. It never was.
Executive summary
The simple numeric claim — Texas 2.1 million, Florida 1.6 million, Minnesota 130,000 — matches reputable state estimates published by Pew and summarized in contemporary fact-checks, but those figures reflect the 2023 unauthorized‑immigrant population as released in 2025 and are not necessarily current to 2026 events; multiple fact‑checks confirm the source and the vintage of the data [1] [2] [3]. The political tagline “Don’t let anyone tell you this is about immigration. It never was.” is an interpretive claim about motive, not a statistical one, and reporting shows competing interpretations and potential political agendas tied to how and when those numbers are deployed [1] [4].
1. The raw numbers: where they come from and what they measure
The tallies cited in the post — roughly 2.1 million in Texas, about 1.6 million in Florida, and roughly 130,000 in Minnesota — were drawn from Pew Research Center’s state estimates of the U.S. unauthorized immigrant population covering through 2023 and reported publicly in 2025, a data series that many outlets and fact‑checkers relied on when debunking viral social posts [1] [2] [4]. Those estimates are consistent with other research organizations’ snapshots: for example, Migration Policy Institute and the American Immigration Council place Texas and Florida among the largest state populations of unauthorized immigrants, and MPI’s state profiles document methods that impute unauthorized status using pooled ACS and SIPP data [5] [6].
2. Important caveats: timing, methods and margins of error
Pew’s state totals reflect imputed estimates based on American Community Survey inputs and are typically presented with rounding and statistical caveats — fact‑checkers noted Pew rounded some state totals (which explains the familiar 2.1 million figure for Texas) and emphasized the data reflect 2023 conditions rather than any specific moment in 2026 [2] [1] [5]. Independent researchers and tools (e.g., CMSNY or Dallas Fed analyses) make additional methodological adjustments for undercount or use microdata to estimate short‑term flows, underscoring that point‑estimates can shift with new surveys, sampling variability, and the time window selected [7] [8].
3. Does the headline claim stand up? Yes — with context
As a factual statement about the 2023 estimates, the numbers are accurate to widely cited, nonpartisan sources and to the fact‑checks that traced the viral posts to Pew’s release; Snopes, Yahoo fact checks and Meaww all concluded the social posts used reputable data but were applying it to a different moment [3] [1] [2]. However, accuracy in counting does not immunize the claim from being misleading if framed to support a policy or political narrative without acknowledging the age of the data, regional growth dynamics, or uncertainty bounds [1] [4].
4. “It never was about immigration”: competing interpretations and hidden agendas
The rhetorical claim that “it never was about immigration” is a political interpretation that cannot be proven or disproven purely by the population numbers; reporting around the December 2025–January 2026 DHS operations in Minnesota shows how selective use of state estimates can be mobilized to justify enforcement actions or to craft broader political narratives, and fact‑checkers flagged exactly this kind of narrative‑deployment when the Pew numbers circulated amid enforcement news [1] [2]. Observers on different sides argue either that enforcement targets lawlessness and public safety or that actions are symbolic, politically timed, and aimed at stoking national debate — those are conflicting explanations grounded in policy goals and politics rather than in the headcounts themselves [4] [6].