Immigration is a key issue in the 2024 presidential race.
Crossings dropped sharply this spring and summer after the Biden administration tightened border controls and closed off migrants’ access to the asylum system. Still, apprehensions exceeded 1.3 million during the first nine months of the 2024 fiscal year.
Biden’s handling of border security was among his worst-rated issues in polls before he ended his campaign July 21 and endorsed Kamala Harris, his vice president, for the presidency. Harris has also grappled with the issue. Former president Donald Trump — who faced criticism for his immigration policies, such as separating migrant children from their parents — won his third consecutive Republican nomination this summer while promising to “close the border” and round up immigrants using U.S. troops.
Trump rallied Republicans early this year to block a $118 billion bipartisan Senate bill that tied border reforms to Ukraine aid. Biden, who backed the bill, insists his administration’s ability to stem illegal crossings is limited without new laws and resources from Congress. Still, the executive actions he’s taken in recent months have left the border quieter than at any point since he took office.
Here are 12 charts showing the state of the immigration system and the southern border under Biden compared with Trump through the end of fiscal 2023, which was Oct. 1. The Washington Post will update the charts with new data at the end of fiscal 2024.
Illegal crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border
Illegal border crossings soared in the months after Biden took office and rolled back many Trump-era restrictions. Biden warned that he would still enforce immigration laws, and he temporarily kept in place a Trump pandemic policy known as Title 42 that allowed authorities to quickly expel border crossers.
Once his administration announced it would not use the Title 42 policy to turn back unaccompanied minors who arrived without a parent or guardian, their numbers spiked. Images of migrant children and teens packed shoulder-to-shoulder in detention facilities produced the administration’s first border emergency. Soon after, Biden assigned Harris to lead a new effort to address the “root causes” of Central American emigration, including the economic, political and safety issues that spur people to flee.
Teens and children crossing without their parents arrived in record numbers during the first three years of Biden’s presidency. Families and single adults have crossed at historic rates as well.
Migrants are coming from a wider variety of countries than ever before. In 2019, the busiest year for border crossings under Trump, about 80 percent of migrants taken into U.S. custody were from Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras. Last year those three countries accounted for fewer than half of all border crossings.
Migrants from Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Senegal and Mauritania — along with other nations in Africa, Europe and Asia — have crossed from Mexico in numbers U.S. authorities have never seen. For example, 14,965 migrants from China arrived across the southern border between October 2023 and December 2023, Border Patrol data shows, up from 29 over that same period in 2020. The Border Patrol encountered 9,518 migrants from India during that same three-month span, compared with 56 during that period in 2020.
The challenge of processing, detaining and potentially deporting migrants from such a wide array of nations has strained the Biden administration, which often resorted to releasing migrants into the United States when facilities became overcrowded and requests for humanitarian protection couldn’t be resolved quickly.
Deportations, returns and expulsions
In the year after Title 42 ended in May 2023, Biden officials deported or returned roughly 740,000 people to Mexico and other countries, more than any year since 2010, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
That means Biden’s removals also exceed Trump’s totals, which averaged roughly 500,000 annually.
Biden’s higher numbers are partly the result of a much greater volume of illegal crossings.
Trump implemented the Title 42 policy at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic in March 2020 to rapidly expel border crossers without giving them a chance to seek U.S. protection. Unlawful border crossings plunged as global travel stalled. Most of those who crossed were quickly expelled.
Biden kept the policy in place and ended up expelling five times as many border-crossers than Trump did, mainly because more migrants attempted to enter the United States, drawn in part by plentiful jobs.
The Biden administration has released more than 3.3 million border crossers into the United States since 2021. Those migrants make up less than half of the 7.6 million who have been apprehended at the southern border.
U.S. interior immigration enforcement
Border enforcement was among several policies that shifted from Trump’s term to Biden’s.
On Biden’s first day in office, his administration ordered a pause on most arrests and deportations from the interior of the United States by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Trump had promised to deport “millions” of immigrants during his term but fell well short of that goal, despite giving ICE officers broad latitude to go after anyone without legal status in the United States. Deportations of migrants arrested by ICE averaged about 80,000 annually during Trump’s term.
Biden’s Department of Homeland Security issued new guidelines to ICE officers in 2021, directing them to prioritize national security threats, serious or violent criminals and recent border-crossers. Worksite enforcement — “raids” — were halted.
Deportations of migrants arrested by ICE have fallen to about 35,000 per year since Biden took office. Biden officials say they’re doing a better job targeting criminals who pose a threat to public safety, instead of detaining otherwise law-abiding immigrant workers.
Parole
Parole, in U.S. immigration law, is an executive power that allows the government to temporarily admit migrants who don’t qualify for a visa. Biden has relied heavily on parole powers as the basis for his broader strategy to expand opportunities for migrants to reach the United States lawfully while toughening penalties against those who cross illegally.
The Trump administration used parole at times to alleviate severe overcrowding and help Customs and Border Protection (CBP) process migrants more quickly. But Biden’s use of the authority is the most expansive in U.S. history. Republicans say that his administration has exceeded its powers and that parole was meant to be used sparingly on a case-by-case basis.
Biden officials say their implementation of a parole program in January 2023, allowing entry by 30,000 migrants per month from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela fleeing political repression and economic turmoil, has reduced the border influx. Fewer Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans crossed the border illegally last year, and although the program has been less successful with Venezuelans, their crossings have also slowed in recent months.
Refugees
Trump slashed U.S. refugee admissions and set the cap at 15,000 in 2021 — the lowest level since the 1980 Refugee Act. Biden promised to rebuild the admissions program, and in June, the White House said the program is “stronger than ever.”
While Biden has admitted more refugees than Trump did, his administration is still falling below the 125,000 annual cap it has set, in part due to the strains cause by so many border arrivals.
The U.S. government plans to resettle more than 100,000 refugees this fiscal year, the most in three decades.
Naturalized citizens
Citizenship applications soared during Trump’s campaign and while he was in office after he vowed to curb immigration as president. By the end of his tenure, however, naturalizations lagged amid backlogs and financial struggles at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that processes applications. In 2020, his administration instituted a new citizenship exam, which advocates said was more difficult to pass.
After Biden took office, he restored the old exam and encouraged more immigrants to apply for U.S. citizenship.
An estimated 9 million legal permanent residents are eligible to become citizens, which allows them to serve on juries, apply for federal jobs and vote in U.S. elections.
Naturalizations climbed during Biden’s first two years in office but slumped last year. The number of new citizens taking the oath remains higher than during the Trump administration.
Immigration courts
The U.S. immigration court system — a branch of the Department of Justice — was facing a huge case backlog when Biden took office, and the number of cases has more than doubled since then, surpassing 3 million. Many migrants are seeking asylum, a humanitarian protection for people fleeing persecution. Some of the migrants who have crossed the border recently and asked for protection are being scheduled for court hearings more than five years away.
The inability of the system to settle cases quickly has become an incentive for additional illegal migration, because border crossers with weak asylum claims can file for protection and spend years living and working in the United States before having to worry about the risk of deportation.
