How many undocumented immigrants entered the US each year from 2017 to 2020 under the Trump administration?
Executive summary
There is no single, reliable tally of how many people “entered the U.S. undocumented” each calendar year from 2017–2020 because the government does not—and cannot—count undetected crossings; analysts therefore rely on border “apprehensions” and statistical models as imperfect proxies [1]. Border apprehensions and encounters fluctuated sharply during those years (including a major 2019 spike and a pandemic-driven dip in 2020), so any yearly estimate must be presented as a modeled range with important caveats [2] [3].
1. The question being asked and why it’s hard to answer
Asking “how many undocumented immigrants entered” seeks a flow variable for people who evaded detection; federal agencies report apprehensions and encounters, not total undetected entries, so researchers combine CBP apprehension data with modeled apprehension rates to estimate unauthorized entries—which produces uncertainty and year-to-year sensitivity to policy, weather and pandemic effects [1] [4].
2. What the raw government numbers show (apprehensions and encounters)
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reported large year-to-year swings in apprehensions during the Trump years—for example, 396,579 apprehensions in one year-and then an 851,508 figure for the Oct 2018–Sept 2019 fiscal year, illustrating the large spike in 2019 before the pandemic [3]. Monthly counts also varied wildly: the Trump years included monthly lows (around April 2017) and monthly highs (May 2019), and the end of the administration still saw more than 69,000 apprehensions in each of the last four months of 2020–21, showing that monthly volatility was extreme [2].
3. How analysts convert apprehensions into estimates of total unauthorized entries
Demographers and groups such as USAFacts and DHS model an “apprehension rate” (the share of attempted crossings detected) and apply it to apprehensions to estimate total unauthorized entries; their work finds the average annual estimated unauthorized entries fell from over 1.4 million in 2000–2012 to just over 190,000 on average for 2013–2020, demonstrating that modeled entries for the Trump years are much lower than earlier peaks but not pinpoint precise [1].
4. What can reasonably be said for 2017–2020 specifically
Available public reporting does not provide an authoritative, year-by-year count of undetected entries for 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020; the best available public evidence is the pattern of CBP apprehensions (large rise into 2019, then a COVID-related decline in 2020) and model-based estimates that put annual unauthorized entries in the low hundreds of thousands for the 2013–2020 period—meaning each of 2017–2020 plausibly falls in a range around that order of magnitude, with 2019 substantially higher in encounters and 2020 depressed by pandemic expulsions under Title 42 [3] [2] [1] [4].
5. Key caveats, disagreements and political uses of the numbers
Different actors use the data to advance competing narratives: administrations tout falling encounters as policy success (DHS/White House releases), while analysts warn about misuse of “encounters” and apples-to-oranges comparisons that conflate legal port-of-entry asylum appointments with illegal crossings [5] [4]. Researchers dispute headline claims about millions “leaving” or being “removed” without careful demographic modeling; independent fact-checkers and academic analysts emphasize seasonal patterns, policy shifts and data limitations [6] [2].
6. Bottom line — what the public can rely on
It is accurate to say that CBP apprehensions rose sharply into 2019 and then fell sharply in 2020 due to pandemic-era expulsions and changing conditions, and that model-based estimates place annual unauthorized entries in the low hundreds of thousands during 2017–2020 rather than the millions sometimes claimed—but no source in the public reporting reviewed provides an exact, definitive count of undocumented entries by calendar year for 2017–2020 [3] [2] [1] [4].