How many unique individuals (not encounters) crossed the U.S. southern border during 2021–2024 according to DHS and independent audits?
Executive summary
The Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Customs and Border Protection publish encounter counts—not a definitive tally of unique individuals—so the official public record does not provide a clear number of distinct people who crossed the Southwest border in 2021–2024 [1] [2] [3]. Independent reporting and oversight documents reiterate high encounter totals (roughly 10–11 million nationwide spanning recent years) but do not resolve how many of those encounters represent repeat crossings by the same individuals versus truly unique persons [4] [5].
1. Encounters are the metric DHS and CBP publish, repeatedly and explicitly
CBP’s public statistics and the Homeland Security Key Metrics define “encounters” to include USBP Title 8 apprehensions, OFO Title 8 inadmissibles and Title 42 expulsions and the datasets are presented as encounter events rather than deduplicated persons, a distinction that CBP and OHSS documentation make clear [1] [2] [3].
2. What the encounter totals say for 2021–2024 — big numbers, but not unique people
Congressional and independent compilations point to roughly 10.8 million CBP encounters since the start of FY2021 and nearly 11 million unauthorized border encounters in overlapping multi‑year windows reported by USAFacts, which aggregates CBP data [4] [5]. Those figures are frequently cited as the scale of migration pressure, but every one of those citations is explicitly an “encounters” tally, not a count of unique individuals [4] [5].
3. Why encounters overstate distinct persons: repeats, inadmissibles, and “gotaways”
Multiple DHS and CBP releases acknowledge key measurement gaps: some migrants are processed multiple times and thus appear multiple times in encounter data; others evade detection (so they never appear); and CBP’s own operational dashboards and fact sheets warn that encounter counts are events rather than de‑duplicated person‑level counts [3] [6]. Independent analyses have estimated substantial numbers of “getaways” (people who cross without encountering CBP)—for example a preliminary USAFacts reference to an estimated ~660,000 evaded apprehension in FY2021—further complicating any simple conversion from encounters to unique people [5].
4. Audits, oversight and DHS reporting do not deliver a single “unique persons” figure
The Office of Homeland Security Statistics has published methodology and enforcement reports that discuss the concepts of unique individuals and family units, and a DHS FY2021 Southwest Border Enforcement Report notes shifts in family composition, implying efforts to parse unique people, but the excerpts available do not present a reconciled, multi‑year unique‑person count for 2021–2024 [7] [3]. In short, neither CBP’s encounter dashboards nor OHSS public materials in the supplied reporting provide a validated total of unique individuals across 2021–2024.
5. Political actors use encounter totals and frame them differently; read the source not the spin
Congressional releases from the House Homeland Security Committee and DHS public statements both lean on the encounter series to make divergent policy claims—one emphasizing “startling” totals, the other highlighting that new policies reduced encounters—yet both rely on the same underlying encounter metric rather than claiming a unique‑individual total [4] [8]. That produces competing narratives about scale and progress while leaving the central technical question—how many distinct people crossed between 2021 and 2024—unresolved in public sources cited here.
6. Bottom line: no authoritative unique‑individual count in the reviewed sources; only encounter totals
Based on the provided reporting, the best available authoritative numbers are encounter counts (roughly 8–11 million encounters in the relevant recent windows cited by CBP, Congressional summaries and independent aggregators), but none of the supplied DHS/CBP or oversight excerpts supplies a deduplicated, audited total of unique individuals who crossed the Southwest border during 2021–2024 [4] [5] [1] [3]. To produce a defensible estimate of unique people would require access to DHS biometric deduplication outputs or an independent audit specifically reconciling encounter events to individual identities—data not present in the documents provided [3] [7].