What types of persons are trying illegally to enter the U.S.; and how many are receiving benefits (debit cards, lodging, social security, EBT benefits etc)?
Executive summary
A mix of single adults, families, asylum-seekers and people who overstayed visas — increasingly from Central and South America and other regions beyond Mexico — account for most recent unauthorized attempts to enter the United States, with many encounters and releases recorded by Border Patrol and CBP [1] [2] [3]. Available reporting and official data estimate the unauthorized population in the low-to-mid tens of millions and document millions of “encounters” and hundreds of thousands of parole entries, but the sources do not provide reliable, comprehensive counts of how many of those people receive U.S. public benefits such as debit cards, lodging, Social Security or EBT [4] [5] [6].
1. Who is trying to enter illegally: demographic mix and legal categories
Recent reporting shows the unauthorized flow is heterogeneous: many border encounters are single adults, especially on northern sectors, while the southwest surge in recent years included larger family groups and asylum-seekers from Central and South America and elsewhere; at the same time a growing share of the unauthorized population arrived by overstaying visas rather than illicitly crossing the border [7] [2] [1]. Government encounter categories collected by CBP separate Title 8 apprehensions, OFO inadmissibles and Title 42 expulsions, underscoring that the population includes migrants processed under different legal authorities — apprehended crossers, inadmissible arrivals at ports of entry, expulsions and formally paroled groups such as the CHNV parolees [3] [8] [7].
2. How many: encounters, population estimates and modeling caveats
CBP encounter statistics and independent estimates provide multiple, imperfect measures: encounters — which can double-count repeat crossers — reached into the millions across recent years and have been used as a proxy for flows, while population estimates put the unauthorized population roughly around 10–12 million in some analyses and as high as 11.7 million or more in provisional CMS and Census-influenced estimates for 2023, with alternative estimates and timeframes varying by methodology [4] [5] [9]. The Congressional Budget Office models people who cross without encountering CBP and projected groups numbering in the low hundreds of thousands for specific years, illustrating the modeling uncertainty in “how many succeeded” versus “how many were encountered” [10]. FactCheck and USAFacts caution that apprehensions and encounters can overstate unique individuals because of repeat attempts and differing processing categories [6] [9].
3. Who is receiving public benefits: what the sources say (and do not say)
The reviewed sources do not produce a verified national tally of migrants receiving benefits such as government-issued debit cards, government-funded lodging, Social Security payments or EBT/SNAP under their own identity; reporting instead documents programs and administrative classifications. The Center for Migration Studies emphasizes that undocumented workers pay roughly $16 billion a year into Social Security and Medicare but, because of legal status, are not eligible to collect those benefits — a direct rebuttal to claims that undocumented migrants broadly draw Social Security [11]. Wikipedia’s summary of program rules notes that households headed by undocumented parents are generally ineligible for many federal assistance programs (TANF, expanded Medicaid, Section 8 housing), with narrow exceptions such as Medicaid or CHIP for U.S.-citizen children and SNAP benefits on behalf of U.S.-citizen children in some cases [12]. CBP and oversight reporting document releases and parole numbers — for example, hundreds of thousands paroled under CHNV and millions initially released or removed in processing — but those sources stop short of linking releases to quantified benefit receipts like lodging stipends or debit cards at scale [7] [6] [5].
4. Limits, political narratives and where misinformation appears
Political actors and some committees present headline counts of “released” migrants or claim wide use of benefits, yet fact-checkers and migration researchers caution the statistics are messy: encounter totals include repeat crossers, expulsions and different processing authorities; program eligibility is complex; and official sources typically do not report a national, itemized ledger of benefits distributed to unauthorized entrants [6] [9] [12]. The CMS corrective pieces explicitly push back against misleading claims that undocumented immigrants collect large-scale Social Security benefits, while congressional fact sheets and some political statements focus attention on encounters and parole counts without supplying independent data on subsequent benefit receipt [11] [7].
5. Bottom line: what can be stated with confidence
It is supportable to say that the group trying to enter illegally encompasses single adults, families and asylum-seekers and that millions of encounters and hundreds of thousands of parole or release events have occurred in recent years; however, existing public reporting and official data do not provide a definitive count of how many unauthorized entrants receive specific benefits such as debit cards, government-paid lodging, Social Security payments or EBT — and federal law generally bars many categories of undocumented households from most federal cash and entitlement programs, with limited exceptions for citizens within mixed-status families [7] [6] [12] [11].