Is There Really a Border Crisis?

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) publishes its border counts at cbp.gov, and they come in two kinds. Until March 2020 the Border Patrol reported apprehensions between ports of entry, and the people found inadmissible at the ports were counted separately. Since then CBP has reported “encounters”. These add expulsions under Title 42, a public health order of March 2020, and, in the headline totals, the people processed at ports of entry.

The chart and the table use the one series that runs the whole way, Border Patrol between ports of entry, and the table gives the headline total beside it. Both count events, so a person caught three times counts three times, in 2000 as in 2023.

How to read it: each bar is one fiscal year of Border Patrol encounters at the southwest border, in thousands, between ports of entry only. The three red bars, FY2021 to FY2023, are the years above FY2000; FY2022 is the record. Every value is in the table below, in its Border Patrol column. Source: CBP, as compiled by Pew Research Center (2 February 2026).

Sources: for the Border Patrol column, CBP as compiled by Pew Research Center (2 February 2026). For the headline total, CBP’s totals: FY2019 from its FY2019 figures, FY2020 to FY2022 as reported by Just the News (October 2022), and FY2023 to FY2025 as reproduced by the House Committee on Homeland Security (November 2025).

Pew Research Center’s compilation of CBP’s monthly figures runs from October 1999. Its highest month was December 2023, with 249,740 Border Patrol encounters, or about 302,000 once arrivals at ports of entry are added. The lowest was July 2025, at 4,592. August 2026, the latest month CBP has published, brought 8,870, which is 96% below December 2023.

The fall did not begin when Trump took office on January 20, 2025. Border Patrol encounters halved in a single month, from 249,740 in December 2023 to 124,215 in January 2024. They dropped again after the Biden administration restricted asylum claims in June 2024, from 117,905 in May to 56,400 in July. After Trump took office they dropped again, from 47,320 in December 2024 to 8,349 in February 2025.

How to read it: each point is one month of Border Patrol encounters at the southwest border, in thousands, between ports of entry only, from October 2022 to December 2025. The table below gives every month of FY2023 to FY2025. October and November 2025 were 7,989 and 7,348. December was 6,478. Source: CBP, as compiled by Pew Research Center (2 February 2026).

The fiscal year runs from October to September, so FY2025 begins in October 2024. Source: CBP, as compiled by Pew Research Center (2 February 2026); August 2026 from CBP’s release of 16 September 2026.

CBP sorts the people it encounters into single adults, individuals in family units (each person counted), unaccompanied children and, at the ports, accompanied minors. In FY2023 it counted 2.48 million southwest border encounters, by its year-end figures as ABC15 Arizona reported them. In those figures about three in five were single adults and a third were people in families. About 6% were unaccompanied children. In January 2026, 90% of the Border Patrol’s southwest border apprehensions were single adults (DHS).

Unaccompanied children have since fallen by about 93%. The Border Patrol apprehended more than 130,000 of them in FY2023, about 11,000 a month (Congressional Research Service). From February to November 2025 it apprehended 7,207, about 720 a month, by CBP’s monthly figures.

Title 42 was a public health order that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued on March 20, 2020. It let U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) expel people within hours, without a hearing or a removal order, and it ended on May 11, 2023.

A removal under immigration law (Title 8) bars re-entry for five or ten years. A second removal bars it for twenty. Crossing again after a removal is a federal crime. An expulsion carried none of that, so a person expelled on Monday could try again on Tuesday and be counted again.

The statistics office of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) counts the repeats. In FY2021, 35% of CBP’s encounters were of people encountered in the previous 12 months, against an average of 15% in 2014 to 2019. The share was 45% in the opening months of Title 42 (March to September 2020) and 26% in FY2022.

CBP’s recidivism rate, the share of people caught more than once in a year, went from 7% in FY2019 to 26% in FY2020. In FY2021 it was 27%.

CBP said at the time that “total encounters somewhat overstate the number of unique individuals arriving at the border”. Its count of people not encountered in the previous 12 months was 845,307 for FY2021 through July, in more than 1.3 million southwest border encounters. At the same point in FY2019 it was 796,400. For FY2022, DHS counts 1,742,000 such people in 2,341,000 southwest border encounters, about three in four.

None of this means the 2000s were counted more cleanly. CBP’s recidivism rate stood at 25% in FY2005 and 27% to 29% from FY2006 to FY2009. It then fell to 14% by FY2014, so under Title 42 repeat crossing went back to where it had been fifteen years earlier. DHS counts 2005 as the earliest year with data, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s figures stop in 1989. So for FY2000 there is nothing to go on.

Sources: DHS Office of Homeland Security Statistics, Immigration Enforcement Actions for FY2022, and DHS’s 2017 estimates of border security (2005 as the earliest year with data). CBP’s monthly updates, and its enforcement statistics for the recidivism rate from FY2014. The rates for FY2005 to FY2009 are CBP’s budget-justification figures, as charted in a 2021 court declaration by Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council. The figures to 1989 are as the Cato Institute reports them.

Download this conclusion: repeat crossings

This card takes apart the idea that Title 42 repeat crossings turned the record years into ordinary ones. Repeats were 35% of encounters in 2021, against 15% in the years before. But CBP’s own recidivism rate was as high in the mid-2000s as under Title 42. Anyone may download it and post it.

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From January 2023, CBP’s phone app, CBP One, let people book appointments at ports of entry, 1,450 a day from mid-2023. People processed with an appointment are counted in the headline total as encounters at a port. More than 936,500 people had booked through it by the end of December 2024. The Trump administration ended the appointments on January 20, 2025.

High crossing numbers are not new. Border Patrol apprehensions at the southwest border reached about 1.62 million in FY1986 and 1,643,679 in FY2000, a record until FY2021 (Congressional Research Service).

Who was crossing has changed more than how many. The Congressional Research Service found from the tables of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) that in FY2000, 98% of those apprehended were Mexican nationals, most of them single adult men, and that few asked for asylum. In FY2019 it counted 166,458 Mexicans among 851,508 apprehensions, about 20%. That year Pew Research Center counted 607,774 from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, about 71%.

In FY2023, by the Migration Policy Institute’s count, 51% of encounters at and between southwest border ports of entry were of people from beyond Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. That was up from 12% three years earlier.

People from farther away are harder to return. The statistics office of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) says encounters from outside Mexico and northern Central America posed extra challenges, because repatriation agreements, logistics and feasibility differ. It adds that DHS could not verify those nationalities electronically, which made removals slower.

Where people arrive has changed too. CBP officers recorded about 430,000 encounters at southwest border ports of entry in FY2023, two and a half times FY2022’s 173,000. Nationwide, by CBP’s own figures, 15% of encounters were at ports of entry in FY2021 and 46% in FY2024.

“Got-aways” are people seen or tracked crossing illegally, by agents, sensors, cameras or footprints, who were neither caught nor turned back. The term is defined in federal law and used by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Anyone never detected is missing from the count. Raul Ortiz, then Chief of the Border Patrol, told Congress in 2023 that the count probably misses 10% to 20%.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has published its own yearly got-away counts, marked unofficial. It counted 136,808 got-aways nationwide in FY2020 and 387,398 in FY2021. Then came 606,131 in FY2022 and 670,674 in FY2023. The three years from FY2021 to FY2023 came to about 1.66 million. Alejandro Mayorkas, then Secretary of Homeland Security, gave Congress 389,155 for FY2021 and more than 600,000 for FY2023.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) put FY2023 at 860,000. It took 750,000 detected got-aways and added 15% for people never seen. DHS had still published no official figure for FY2023 or FY2024 by September 2025. CBO’s January 2026 outlook puts people entering without meeting a CBP official at about 50,000 in 2025.

Got-aways rose under Title 42 and fell once it ended. The Migration Policy Institute sets the rise beside the rise in repeat crossing. CBP’s nationwide monthly counts give 66,988 in April 2023, the last full month of Title 42. Two months later the count was 30,116. February 2024 brought 20,886.

An encounter is not an outcome either. People sent to immigration court joined a backlog of about 3.75 million cases at the end of 2024. In that backlog, the average pending case in February 2025 had waited 636 days. The backlog has fallen since, to 3,092,988 at the end of August 2026, of which 2,278,978 were people with asylum applications on file.

Judges granted asylum in 38.2% of decisions in August 2024 and 19.2% in August 2025. In June 2026 the rate was 5.5%, a fall that the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) traces back to before the change of administration.

Sources: 6 U.S.C. 223 and DHS’s Border Security Metrics Report (the definition); CBP’s published counts, yearly and monthly; the hearing transcripts (Ortiz and Mayorkas); CBO’s Demographic Outlooks of January 2024 and January 2026; the Migration Policy Institute (repeat crossing); TRAC (tracreports.org), from the immigration courts’ own records.

Enforcement data contradict this claim. In FY2021 to FY2024, which began in October 2020 under Trump, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) carried out more than 4.7 million repatriations (removals, returns and Title 42 expulsions). Most of them were expulsions, and like encounters, they count events, not people.

The Migration Policy Institute found that the Biden administration’s nearly 4.4 million repatriations by February 2024 already exceeded every presidential term since George W. Bush’s second. It also found that after Title 42 ended in May 2023, the administration removed or returned 775,000 people in 12 months, the most in any fiscal year since 2010.

Encounters did reach records, and for much of FY2024 the Border Patrol released most people it apprehended to await a court hearing (Congressional Research Service).

In Trump’s first term the Border Patrol’s count more than doubled in FY2019, to 851,508, the most since FY2007. He declared a national emergency on February 15, 2019. The monthly count peaked that May, had fallen by more than three quarters by February 2020, before the pandemic, and rose again under Title 42.

On his first day back, January 20, 2025, Trump declared a national emergency at the border and ordered the military to help. The same day he suspended asylum for people crossing the border and ended CBP One. He also revived Remain in Mexico, which made many asylum seekers wait in Mexico while U.S. immigration courts heard their cases.

DHS extended expedited removal nationwide the next day. People subject to expedited removal bypass the immigration courts, where a judge would hear their case. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reports that since May 2025 the Border Patrol has released none of the people it apprehends, a count that leaves out ports of entry.

The fall began a year earlier. By December 2024 Border Patrol encounters were 81% below the December 2023 peak. FY2025’s 237,538, the lowest total since 1970, starts in October 2024. By CBP’s own count, 72% of it came in the 111 days before Trump took office. The monthly counts cannot separate the two administrations’ measures from each other or from Mexico’s increased immigration enforcement.

True of encounters. On the Border Patrol series, the same measure in every year and one that never included ports of entry, FY2021, FY2022 and FY2023 are each above FY2000’s 1,643,679.

Three things qualify the comparison. Only the share of would-be crossers caught may reverse it, and only for crossings.

First, encounters count events. Under Title 42 about a quarter of the people caught were caught more than once in the year. The same was true of FY2005 to FY2009, at 25% to 29%. No such figure exists for FY2000.

Second, until the Obama years most people caught were allowed to return voluntarily, mostly to Mexico (Migration Policy Institute). By FY2023 more than half of encounters were of people from beyond Mexico and northern Central America, who are harder to return (Migration Policy Institute).

Third, an encounter is someone who was caught. DHS estimates that the Border Patrol caught 42.5% of would-be crossers in 2000, a majority only since 2013, and 78% on average in 2018 to 2020. At 42.5%, FY2000’s 1.64 million apprehensions imply about 3.9 million attempts. FY2022’s 2.21 million encounters plus 606,131 known got-aways make about 2.8 million. The older estimates are model-based and uncertain, and attempts are not people either.

Even without ports of entry, the Border Patrol recorded 7.4 million encounters in FY2021 to FY2024, the most for any four years since 1960. The most before FY2021 was 6.1 million, in FY1997 to FY2000, and the figures of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) cannot show repeat crossing was rarer then. Got-aways, people seen crossing but not caught, passed 600,000 a year in FY2022 and FY2023, and nobody knows who they were.

With a court backlog of about 3.75 million cases at the end of 2024, release to await a hearing could mean years in the country. New York City spent $8.2 billion on asylum seekers from July 2022 to June 2025, $3.1 billion of it the state’s. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) puts the surge’s net cost to state and local governments at $9.2 billion in 2023.

The counts qualify this. The records are of encounters. On the estimates of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the years around 2000 had more attempted crossings, most of them successful. Got-aways nationwide also fell from 66,988 in April 2023 to 30,116 two months later.

The headline totals overstate the number of people. CBP counted 154,288 people not encountered in the previous 12 months among July 2021’s 212,672 encounters. For FY2021 as a whole, DHS found encounters up 82% on 2019 but unique people up 30%. Enforcement was heavy. Asking for asylum is lawful whether a person arrives at a port of entry or between them (8 U.S.C. 1158).

CBO also projected that the surge would add $8.9 trillion, or 2.4%, to nominal gross domestic product over 2024 to 2034, and cut federal deficits by $0.9 trillion. It calls this estimate very uncertain.

The counts qualify this too. Repeat crossing ran as high in FY2005 to FY2009, so fewer people than encounters does not make 2021 to 2023 ordinary. Applying is not being granted, and immigration judges granted 38.2% of asylum decisions in August 2024. And CBO’s budget gain is federal, while the costs it measures fall on states and cities.

It depends what you count. U.S. Customs and Border Protection counts encounters, which are events. By that count, the Border Patrol’s series, which runs back to 1960, has its three highest years in 2021, 2022 and 2023.

Counted as attempted crossings, those years were probably not the highest. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) puts the share of would-be crossers the Border Patrol caught at 42.5% in 2000 and 78% in 2018 to 2020. On those estimates, FY2000 had about 3.9 million attempts and FY2022 about 2.8 million.

What changed was who came and what happened next. In FY2000, 98% of those caught were Mexican nationals, and most returned voluntarily. By FY2023 more than half were from beyond Mexico and northern Central America, and harder to return. For much of FY2024 the Border Patrol released most people it caught to await a hearing, in a court backlog that reached about 3.75 million cases.

Download the conclusion

The verdict above as one image. It shows three Border Patrol counts at the southwest border: 1,643,679 in FY2000, 2,206,436 in FY2022, the record, and 237,538 in FY2025. It is 1,080 by 1,350 pixels, and anyone may download it and post it.

Download the card (PNG, 1,080 × 1,350)