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Fact check: What were the total immigration numbers for the US during Trump's presidency?
Executive Summary
The available sources show that U.S. lawful permanent resident (LPR or “green card”) admissions fell during the latter half of the Trump presidency, with clear year-to-year declines between 2018 and 2020 and a partial rebound by fiscal 2021; combining the documented tallies for fiscal 2018–2021 yields roughly 3.58 million new LPRs, while a complete total for 2017–2021 and for all immigration flows (temporary visas, refugees, asylum grants, and unauthorized arrivals) cannot be calculated from the provided materials alone. The government yearbooks and agency reports cited here are the primary place to compile a full, official total; the yearbook collection is available for download for precise counts and disaggregation [1] [2] [3] [4] [5].
1. What claim emerges when you ask “How many immigrants arrived under Trump?” — a direct tally problem
The immediate claim extracted from the documents is that counts differ by definition: some sources report flows of lawful permanent residents (LPRs), others report total immigrant population estimates or unauthorized populations, and a handful report policy-driven trends. The yearbook collection is positioned as the authoritative repository for annual flows across categories (LPRs, refugees, asylees, naturalizations, temporary admissions), but the provided summaries only give discrete yearly LPR numbers for select years rather than a consolidated five-year total covering the entire Trump term. The most concrete, comparable metric across the sources is LPR admissions by fiscal year, where the pattern is clear: peak flows near 2016–2018 and a notable drop in 2020 tied to pandemic disruptions and policy changes [1] [2] [4].
2. The numbers you can add up now — LPR admissions 2018–2021, and why they matter
Using the figures reported in these sources gives an approximate subtotal for new lawful permanent residents of about 3.58 million for fiscal 2018 through fiscal 2021: roughly 1.1 million in 2018 (described as “nearly 1.1 million”), 1,031,765 in 2019, 707,362 in 2020, and about 740,000 in 2021. That sum illustrates the decline in LPR admissions that coincides with late-administration policies and COVID-19 processing interruptions and shows a partial rebound in FY2021 as travel and consular processing resumed [2] [3] [4] [5]. This subtotal is specific to LPR admissions and does not capture temporary visa entries, refugee resettlement by fiscal year across the period, or unauthorized migration, each of which would change the total immigration figure substantially.
3. Wider immigration metrics show different stories — population, unauthorized flows, and enforcement
Other analyses in the packet highlight differing trends when you look beyond annual LPR admissions. A Pew-style summary in the materials reports a mid-decade decline in the overall immigrant population by 2025 and points to both increases and decreases in yearly arrivals across 2020–2025; another source notes the unauthorized population reached an estimated record high in 2023, driven by later dynamics beyond the Trump term. These accounts show that policy, enforcement, and external events (notably COVID-19) altered both legal admissions and broader population counts, and that some of the biggest shifts recorded in the later 2020s reflect post-2021 dynamics rather than only Trump-era policy [6] [7] [8].
4. Why the reported totals can be misleading — definitions, missing years, and categories
The materials demonstrate several ways totals can mislead: different sources use different definitions (LPR admissions vs. overall immigrant population), some years are missing explicit counts in the summaries (notably fiscal 2017 is not enumerated in the provided extracts), and major categories such as temporary nonimmigrant admissions, refugees resettled, and asylum grants are not consistently tabulated in the extracted analyses. The yearbooks are explicitly recommended for compiling a full accounting because they include disaggregated flows by visa category and origin, but the summary documents here only enable a partial total focused on permanent-resident admissions [1] [4] [2].
5. Bottom line: the best-supported answer and the next steps to get a complete tally
From the provided documents, the best-supported, conservative figure for new lawful permanent residents from fiscal 2018–2021 is about 3.58 million, and that subtotal illustrates the decline in admissions during the final years tied to policy and pandemic effects; a complete five-year LPR total for 2017–2021 and a full immigration total across all categories requires consulting the DHS Yearbook tables and the annual flow reports referenced here. For a precise, defensible five-year total or a total that includes refugees, temporary visas and unauthorized adjustments, download and sum the annual tables in the yearbook collection and the Office of Immigration Statistics flow reports [1] [3] [4].