Donald Trump and his allies claim that “20 million illegal immigrants” entered the United States under Joe Biden. This number is not supported by any serious analysis of the available data; it is a political talking point built on systematic misrepresentation of border statistics and deliberate historical amnesia.
From fiscal year 2021 through 2024, U.S. Customs and Border Protection recorded roughly 8.7 million encounters at the southwest border and about 10.8 million encounters at all borders combined. Encounters, however, are events, not people: one migrant who is turned back and tries again might generate several encounters, and millions of those encounters ended in rapid expulsions or removals rather than long‑term presence in the United States. In parallel, estimates for so‑called known gotaways—migrants observed but not apprehended—range around 1.6 to 2 million for the same period, and are themselves uncertain and politically contested.
If one simply adds encounters and gotaways, treats every entry as a unique person, and ignores repeat attempts and removals, one can manufacture a narrative of 10–12 million “illegal” entries under Biden. Trump goes further and inflates this into “20 million,” a figure that cannot be reconciled with any published enforcement or population data. Fact‑checkers and migration scholars who adjust for recidivism and expulsions converge instead on a much lower order of magnitude: on the basis of the 8.7 million southwest encounters, plausible repeat‑attempt rates of around 20–30 percent, and several million Title 42 expulsions and other removals, they estimate roughly 2.1 to 3.0 million unique individuals who had an encounter and were ultimately allowed to remain in the country between 2021 and 2024. When one adds an estimated 1.6–2.0 million gotaways, a reasonable range for irregular entrants who arrived and stayed under Biden is about 3.7 to 5 million—not trivial, but nowhere near the double‑digit millions Trump asserts.
Trump’s rhetoric rests on several conflations. First, he routinely presents encounter totals as counts of people “allowed into” the country, erasing the distinction between contact with the border and successful long‑term entry. Second, he treats gotaways as a homogeneous class of dangerous criminals and “insane” people supposedly emptied out of foreign prisons and psychiatric institutions, despite the absence of any evidence that millions of such high‑risk individuals are present; official data on migrants with criminal records or gang ties are orders of magnitude lower, in the tens of thousands. Third, he frames the Biden years as an unprecedented breakdown of control, as if previous decades had been characterized by orderly, low‑volume migration, which is historically inaccurate.
A longer perspective puts the Biden surge in context. Irregular migration at the U.S.–Mexico border has been cyclical for decades, driven by U.S. labor demand, economic and security crises in origin countries, and changes in enforcement strategy. Apprehensions in the 1980s and 1990s often exceeded 1.5 million a year, and the long‑standing “record” years predated Biden by decades. In the 2000s and early 2010s, apprehensions fell sharply as Mexican migration declined, the border was further militarized, and demographic and economic trends in Mexico changed. Under Trump’s first term, encounters did not stay low: they spiked in 2019, then collapsed in 2020 when the pandemic and Title 42 effectively shut down much cross‑border movement. The “near‑historic lows” Trump now cites were in large part a product of extraordinary conditions—global travel restrictions and emergency public‑health authority—not a stable border‑control equilibrium.
When Biden moved away from blanket Title 42 expulsions and mobility rebounded after COVID‑19, encounters surged sharply, reflecting a combination of pent‑up demand, crises in Latin America, and inconsistent U.S. policy signals. That surge exposed serious weaknesses in the asylum and reception systems and created real local pressures in U.S. border communities and destination cities. But even here, the narrative of a permanently “open border” is hard to square with recent trends: by late 2024 and into 2025, a mix of stricter asylum rules, increased enforcement cooperation with Mexico, and changes in legal pathways drove encounters at the U.S.–Mexico border down to their lowest levels in decades. The trajectory is thus one of sharp spikes and subsequent policy‑driven declines, not of uninterrupted escalation toward Trump’s apocalyptic figures.
Population data reinforce this picture. The best available estimates put the total unauthorized immigrant population in the United States at about 14 million in 2023—up from Trump‑era levels but still far below the 20‑plus million implied by Trump’s rhetoric. That figure reflects net flows over many years, including arrivals and departures before, during, and after Trump’s first term, and it underscores that the Biden period, while marked by unusually high irregular inflows, has not produced a demographic shock of the scale suggested in campaign speeches. When Trump promises to deport 15–20 million people, he is targeting a number that exceeds most mainstream estimates of the entire unauthorized population currently living in the country.
A serious, evidence‑based critique of Biden’s record has much to work with: the administration was slow to adapt capacities to rising numbers; messaging and rule changes were often contradictory; and the asylum system remains overwhelmed. But those weaknesses do not validate the Trumpian narrative of “20 million illegals,” nor the suggestion that Biden alone “created” a crisis at an otherwise orderly border. Rather, the data point to a structural pattern in which successive U.S. administrations, Republican and Democratic alike, confront recurring migration surges shaped by global and regional dynamics, and respond with a shifting mix of deterrence, enforcement, and limited humanitarian adjustments.
For scholarly and public communication, the more accurate formulation is therefore: Biden presided over an exceptionally high period of irregular migration, with around 8.7 million border encounters at the southwest border from 2021 to 2024 and on the order of 3.7 to 5 million irregular entrants who remained in the country, set against a long history of cyclical border pressures and policy oscillation. That description preserves the sense of scale and urgency while resisting the inflation and moral panic that characterize the current Trump administration’s discourse.
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