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Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has been making the rounds on Capitol Hill this month and has tossed out some startling statistics, none more striking than her estimate of 20 million illegal immigrants now in the U.S.
“We don’t know for certain, but we believe it could be upwards of 20 million people that could be in this country illegally,” Ms. Noem told senators in one hearing.
At a Cabinet meeting, she told the president of “20 to 21 million people that need to go home.”
That number is larger than most estimates, but some analysts say it’s not outlandish, given the Biden border surge.
“Biden blew the top off everything,” Stephen A. Camarota, research director at the Center for Immigration Studies, told The Washington Times. “The idea of 20 million now is not crazy anymore.”
His current figure is nearly 16 million, but he said the uncertainties of the Biden years have made the actual figure difficult to determine.
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For much of this century, through the late Bush and Obama years into the first Trump term and even the start of Mr. Biden’s tenure, official estimates put the number at 10 million to 12 million. A few outliers, which might best be described as novel statistical approaches, put the figure much higher.
Mr. Biden’s tenure clearly changed that, though how much is the subject of heated debate, particularly online.
Mike Davis, a Trump loyalist and head of the Article III Project, recently posted a critique of the Supreme Court’s immigration rulings and included an estimate of 10 million illegal immigrants. The comments erupted into a bidding war.
“Ten million? I believe there are at least 20 million,” said one.
“40M+” said another.
“No. There are at least 50 million. We would be lucky if there were only 10 million,” countered a third.
“I bet my retirement more near 100,000,000,” said another.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller has estimated that the Biden administration let 15 million illegal immigrants into the U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance said “approximately 20 million” were “allowed” into the country.
Those estimates are higher than what the official figures would suggest.
Adding all the unauthorized migrants that Customs and Border Protection encountered from January 2021 to December 2024 comes to 10.9 million. Some other percentage represented “gotaways,” who evaded capture. The known gotaways were detected, and others weren’t.
That means the total of illegal entries is likely millions higher.
However, some of the CBP encounters are duplicates. Illegal immigrants who tried, were caught and then tried again were counted for each attempt.
Many migrants came on legal visas but overstayed and have become illegal immigrants.
All this makes calculating the total population using arrivals and departures too fraught with sources of error.
Mr. Camarota and Robert Warren, a demographer at the Center for Migration Studies of New York, have turned to Census Bureau data for snapshots in time.
Mr. Warren uses the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey for his estimates. He said the higher estimates that Ms. Noem and others tossed around are unfathomable.
“The secretary probably should read her report from her agency,” said Mr. Warren, who assists the Department of Homeland Security with its official estimates and co-wrote that latest report, released in April 2024.
It examined the years from 2018 to 2022 and found that the unauthorized population stood at 11.6 million in 2018, dipped to 10.5 million in 2020 and started rebounding to 11 million by 2022.
Mr. Warren said the estimates of more than 20 million people cannot be correct, given what he sees in the census data.
The data shows only about 20 million noncitizens who live here and who arrived after 1981. Given the 1986 amnesty and some other factors, the 20 million, give or take some adjustments for a census undercount, represents the absolute upper limit on illegal immigrants.
The number will be lower because a significant percentage of those 20 million are also in the U.S. with some legal status.
“So if you’ve got 20 million that comprises the entire possible undocumented population, and you know 10 million of them are legal, you’ve got very little leeway unless you think the Census Bureau misses half of the undocumented population,” he said.
Mr. Camarota agreed that the figure had been steady for most of this century, but he said the Biden era “shows an explosion” of noncitizen Hispanics.
He said 20 million is still probably too high. He said the number would show up in secondary indications such as school enrollment or births, given that the surge of border jumpers was so heavily Hispanic and immigrants from that region tend to have higher birth rates.
However, he wondered whether most of the new arrivals were men or whether the fertility rates for those populations had changed.
“I would be willing to bet a lot of money it’s between 14 and 17 [million] and around 16 is about right,” he said.
Who is counted as being in the U.S. illegally is a tricky question.
Some analysts would not count those under the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals because DACA granted them a stay of deportation. The same holds for those under temporary protected status, those who have applied for asylum or the millions granted “parole” by the Biden administration.
“What’s your way of estimating the illegal population?” Mr. Camarota said. “We have such a convoluted immigration system that we have enormous numbers of people who are technically inadmissible aliens, don’t have a legal right to be here, but are allowed to stay and work.”
The Federation for American Immigration Reform has the most aggressive estimate, chiefly because it estimates a massive undercount of illegal immigrants, those who don’t appear in the census.
FAIR, which uses a combination of American Community Survey data and the Current Population Survey, another Census Bureau product, put the illegal immigrant population at 18.6 million as of March.
The Migration Policy Institute and the Pew Research Center, two other major players in the field, use the American Community Survey, which means their latest estimates go only to 2022. MPI put the figure at 11.3 million, and Pew pegged it at 11 million.
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