At least 13 million illegal immigrants have entered the United States during Joe Biden’s presidency, and the real number of unlawful arrivals could be more than twice as high.
In the fiscal years of 2021, 2022, 2023 and the 2024 year to date, there have been 9,155,458 illegal immigrants encounters, according to Customs and Border Protection statistics.
But only 30-68% of immigrants entering illegally are apprehended, a 2018 study found, meaning that at least 13.4 million have entered since 2021, and as many 30.5 million.
The low estimate would make the Biden Administration illegal arrivals the country’s fifth largest state, while at the high end the illegal entry population would be equal the equal second-largest with Texas.
The vast majority of illegal entries are at the US/Mexico border, where there have been 961,537 encounters in the first four months of the 2024 fiscal year alone.
By comparison, in the first four months of the 2021 fiscal year there were just 222,456 apprehensions.
The 2018 study also made a conservative estimate that the total illegal immigrant population of the United States in 2016 was 16.7 million, with a 95% probability interval ranging from 16.2 to 29.5 million.
However, these estimates differ from those produced by the Pew Research Center, which put the illegal immigrant population at about 10.5 million by the end of the Trump presidency.
If the Pew figures are correct, that means that the illegal immigrant population has more than doubled since Joe Biden took office, and possibly more than tripled.
According to Pew, illegal immigrants made up 22% of the US foreign-born population in 2022.
Of the 47 million foreign-born residents, the lawful 78% was comprised of 23.1 million naturalised citizens, 11.6 million permanent residents, and 1.8 million temporary residents.
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