A central reason that Donald Trump was president is that there was a spike in minors arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2014. It was an influx that triggered a crisis for the Obama administration — and a bumper crop of commentary in right-wing media.
That was the political environment in which Trump operated, unlike his 2016 competitors. He launched his campaign in June 2015, centering his rhetoric on the idea, lifted from the fringe right’s months of agitation, that those arriving at the border were dangerous. He triggered a backlash — that fit into his narrative of an establishment working against the putative interests of Americans. He surged into the lead for the nomination and then slipped into the presidency.
During his appearance on CNN on Wednesday night, Trump made clear that immigration would continue to be a part of his rhetoric as he seeks the nomination again in 2024. In addition to falsely insisting that he’d finished building a wall on the border — an effort he has in the past blamed President Biden for failing to complete — he decried the scale of immigration since Biden took office.
“Millions of people are coming into our country,” he claimed. “And you know what the number is going to be, in my opinion, by the end of the year? Not the 4 million you hear and the 3 million. I think it’s going to be 15 million people. And these people, they have no idea where they come from.”
This is not true, for reasons that we’ll get into below. But it’s an interesting benchmark for Trump to place. After all, a few hours after he spoke to CNN, a border restriction put in place by his administration, referred to as Title 42, was to be lifted. (Calling the policy “Title 42” is inaccurate, given that the relevant rule derives from part of that statute, but we’ll call it Title 42 for the sake of clarity.) The effect will be to reshape how immigrants seek entry to the United States and how the country responds. But it’s not entirely clear how those things will be reshaped.
We can break the past six years of immigration into four broad periods.
When Trump first took office, the number of people stopped at the border plunged, in part out of concern about how his administration would handle those seeking entry. But by the end of 2018, the number of people seeking to enter the country, often while seeking political asylum, had begun to increase. Trump used that increase as an argument for needing to allocate funding for the border wall, forcing a government shutdown and, eventually, leading to a declaration of a national emergency. A few months later, the number of people being stopped at the border spiked.
Things calmed down in late 2019. Then came the coronavirus pandemic and immigration again fell dramatically. This was the point at which the Trump administration implemented its Title 42 policy — a measure ostensibly intended to limit entry from people who might have covid-19 but, in reality, one that used the pandemic as an excuse to bar asylum seekers unilaterally.
When Biden took office, the number of people seeking entry had already begun to surge again. Since he’s been president, the number of people stopped at the U.S.-Mexico border has been consistently high.
But, again, border stops don’t tell the whole story. Of the 5.1 million people stopped at the border since January 2021, 2.4 million were removed under the auspices of Title 42. The other 2.7 million were apprehended under Title 8 policies that were in place before the Title 42 order and that now remain in place.
Those apprehended under Title 8 are not uniformly released into the country. Data from Customs and Border Protection shows that about 4 in 10 of those stopped under Title 8 since January 2021 were offered humanitarian release — allowed to remain in the U.S. while their asylum or immigration claims were adjudicated. About 6 in 10 remained in custody.
That’s less than a million people who have been granted humanitarian release since Biden took office. When Trump and his allies talk about millions of people “coming into our country,” they generally point to the total number of stops, not the far smaller number of people who are actually released within the United States. Trump’s 15-million-person estimate is not only baseless, but it’s also an exaggeration of an already exaggerated number.
Particularly since Title 42 introduced another unusual dynamic. Since the policy led to people being rapidly deported, many of those who had been removed from the country simply tried again. The rate of recidivism topped 25 percent in both 2020 and 2021, meaning that at least a quarter of those stopped at the border had already been stopped at least once before that same year. In 2019, before Title 42, only 7 percent had been. In other words, ending Title 42 will probably reduce the total number of stops, since there will be fewer quick attempts to reenter the country.
Part of the reason those removed under Title 42 were likely to try to enter again is that, particularly under Biden, they were mostly single adults. In 2014, the surge in immigrants was driven by unaccompanied minors; in 2019, it was families seeking asylum. Since 2020, it has been heavily adults traveling alone, 6 in 10 of whom have been turned away under the auspices of Title 42 since January 2021.
This is important because of something else Trump said on CNN: that he thought his administration’s deeply unpopular policy of separating parents and children at the border was effective.
“When you have that policy, people don’t come,” he claimed. “If a family hears they’re going to be separated, they love their family, they don’t come.”
The data show that this wasn’t true. Moreover, families seeking asylum has not been the main factor in stops under Biden. Only a third of those detained at the border since January 2021 were traveling as a family or as an unaccompanied minor, compared to 72 percent in May 2019.
Those numbers are current through March and, in essence, capture the tail end of the fourth phase of post-2016 immigration. The end of Title 42 is bringing us into a fifth phase and, as a result, almost certainly creating new dynamics of who is coming and how.
In addition to halting Title 42, the Biden administration is imposing a new standard for how immigrants can make asylum claims — a standard aimed at making it easier for the government to turn migrants away at the border. Perhaps the new rules will decrease stops and the number of immigrants released in the U.S., thereby reducing the salience of immigration as an electoral issue (at a cost to those seeking asylum). Or maybe the problem will simply be shuffled around, with the administration forced to figure out a new process for addressing an evolved push to enter the United States.
In 2024, the two presidential candidates may be debating an immigration problem that looks nothing like the one that defined the first two years of Biden’s term. It’s hard to predict what it will look like.
We can assume, though, that Trump will do what he did in 2015: run on the immigration arguments that his base is already agitated about.