Trump's opposition to senators' recent bipartisan $118 billion border bill, which tied border reforms to aid to Ukraine, influenced several Republican lawmakers to reject it. It also dealt a fatal blow to the possibility of enacting new laws and tools that could reduce illegal crossings and relieve pressure on cities suffering from overcrowded shelters.
Here are 12 charts showing the state of the immigration system and the southern border under Biden compared to Trump:
Illegal crossings at the US-Mexico border
The numbers of illegal border crossings soared in the months after Biden took office and immediately rolled back many of the restrictions imposed by Trump. Biden warned that he would continue to enforce immigration laws, temporarily keeping in place Trump's pandemic policy known as Title 42 that allowed authorities to quickly expel border crossers.
The number of people apprehended by the US Border Patrol has reached the highest levels in the agency's 100-year history under Biden, averaging 2 million annually.
During the president's first days in office, his administration announced that it would not use the Title 42 policy to return unaccompanied minors who arrive without a parent or guardian. Their numbers began rising almost immediately, and images of migrant children and teenagers packed shoulder to shoulder in detention facilities sparked the administration's first border emergency. Soon after, Biden tasked Vice President Harris with leading a new effort to address the “root causes” of migration to Central America.
Teenagers and children crossing the border without their parents continue to arrive in near-record numbers. Families and single adults have arrived in historic numbers as well.
Migrants arriving across the U.S.-Mexico border come from a wider variety of countries than ever before. In 2019, the busiest year at border crossings under Trump, about 80 percent of migrants in US custody were from Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras. Last year, those three countries accounted for less than half of all border crossings.
Migrants from Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Senegal and Mauritania – along with other countries in Africa, Europe and Asia – are crossing from Mexico in numbers never seen before by US authorities. For example, 14,965 migrants from China arrived across the southern border between October and December, Border Patrol data show, up from 29 during the same period in 2020. The Border Patrol encountered 9,518 migrants from India during the same three-month period, compared to 56 during that Period from 2020.
The challenge of processing, detaining and deporting migrants from a wide range of countries has strained the Biden administration, which has resorted to releasing migrants into the United States when facilities are overwhelmed and humanitarian protection requests cannot be resolved quickly.
Deportation, return and expulsion
Since Title 42 expired in May, Biden officials have deported or returned nearly 500,000 people to Mexico and other countries, exceeding Trump's total, which averaged about 500,000 a year. But Biden's higher numbers are partly due to a much larger volume of illegal crossings.
Trump implemented the Title 42 policy at the start of the coronavirus pandemic in March 2020 to quickly expel border crossers without giving them a chance to seek U.S. protection. The Trump administration expelled the vast majority of those entering the United States, and border crossings remained relatively low.
Biden kept the policy in place and ended up expelling five times more border crossers than Trump did, mainly because more migrants tried to enter the United States during the period between Biden's inauguration and May 2023 when he ended Chapter 42.
The Biden administration has released more than 2.3 million border crossers into the United States since 2021. The gap between the number of migrants in CBP custody versus the number of people returned or deported has widened in each of the past three years.
Internal immigration enforcement in the United States
Border enforcement was among many policies that shifted from Trump's term to Biden's.
On Biden's first day in office, his administration ordered a temporary halt to most arrests and deportations from within the United States by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Trump had promised to deport “millions” of immigrants during his term, but he did not achieve this goal, despite giving Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers wide latitude to pursue anyone who did not have legal status in the United States. Deportations of immigrants arrested by ICE averaged about 80,000 per year during Trump's term.
Biden's Department of Homeland Security issued new guidelines for ICE officers in 2021 directing them to prioritize national security threats, serious or violent criminals, and recent border crossers. Worksite enforcement – “raids” have been discontinued.
Deportations of immigrants arrested by ICE have fallen to about 35,000 a year since Biden took office. Biden officials say they are doing a better job targeting criminals who pose a threat to public safety, rather than detaining law-abiding migrant workers.
Parole, in US immigration law, is an executive authority that allows the government to temporarily release immigrants who are not eligible for a visa. Biden has relied heavily on parole powers as the foundation of his broader strategy to expand opportunities for immigrants to reach the United States legally while tightening penalties against those who cross the border illegally.
The Trump administration has used parole at times to relieve severe overcrowding and help CBP process migrants more quickly. But Biden's use of power is the most expansive in US history. Republicans say his administration overstepped its authority and parole should have been used sparingly on a case-by-case basis.
Biden officials say their implementation of a parole program in January 2023, which admits 30,000 migrants a month from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela fleeing political repression and economic turmoil, has reduced the flow of migrants across the border. Fewer Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans crossed the border illegally last year, but the program was less successful with Venezuelans.
Trump reduced refugee admissions into the United States and set the cap at 15,000 in 2021 — the lowest level since the 1980 Refugee Act. Biden promised to rebuild the program when he took office. While Biden has received more refugees than Trump, his administration remains short of its annual cap of 125,000, in part because of the pressures faced by too many cross-border arrivals.
Applications for citizenship soared during Trump's campaign and while he was in office after he pledged to limit immigration as president. But by the end of his term, naturalizations were delayed amid backlogs and financial difficulties at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that processes the applications. In 2020, his administration instituted a new citizenship test, which advocates said is more difficult to pass.
After Biden took office, he reinstated the old exam and encouraged more immigrants to apply for US citizenship.
An estimated 9 million legal permanent residents are eligible to become citizens, allowing them to serve on juries, apply for federal jobs, and vote in U.S. elections.
Naturalizations rose during Biden's first two years in office, but declined last year. The number of new citizens being sworn in remains higher than it was during the Trump administration.
The U.S. immigration court system — a branch of the Justice Department — was facing a large backlog of cases when Biden took office, and the backlog has nearly doubled since then to nearly 2.5 million pending cases. Many migrants seek asylum, which is a humanitarian protection for people fleeing persecution. Some migrants who recently crossed the border and requested protection are scheduled to attend court hearings more than five years later.
The system's inability to quickly resolve cases has become an incentive for more illegal immigration, because border crossers with weak asylum claims can file for protection and spend years living and working in the United States before they have to worry about the risk of deportation.
