Biden-era “removals” were a revolving door at the Rio Grande. Trump closed the door. Crossings collapsed.
A recent analysis by the Center for Immigration Studies, based on the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, reveals that the number of illegal immigrants has decreased by approximately 2.3 million since President Trump took office again in January 2025. Additionally, about 600,000 legal immigrants have departed, resulting in a total foreign-born population decline of 2.9 million.
This marks the first prolonged reduction in the immigrant population in the U.S. in nearly a century.
Steven A. Camarota, CIS research director, along with demographer Karen Zeigler, examined monthly household survey data from January 2025 through July 2026. Their findings show the foreign-born population—including naturalized citizens, permanent residents, long-term temporary visitors, and illegal immigrants—shrunk from roughly 53.3 million to 50.5 million.
Camarota’s initial estimate places the illegal immigrant population at 13.5 million as of July, down from 15.8 million when Trump was inaugurated.
“We’ve never seen anything quite like this before,” Camarota told The Washington Times. “This is big and sustained, as best as we can tell.”
He further described it as “a fundamental change, and it’s profound.”
The same data reflects what occurred during the Biden administration. Between January 2021 and January 2025, the foreign-born population surged by 8.3 million—the most significant increase over four years in U.S. history.
Policies such as catch-and-release, widespread parole, asylum exploitation, and an effectively open southern border resulted in exactly the outcomes critics anticipated. The survey data now highlights a reversal of that uptick.
The CIS approach does not rely on counting flight arrivals but instead measures the net change—accounting for new arrivals minus deportations, voluntary departures, legalizations, and deaths. This explains why the reported 2.3 million decrease in illegal immigrants contrasts with higher Homeland Security departure figures.
After one year into Trump’s second term, DHS reported nearly 3 million illegal immigrants had exited the U.S., including approximately 675,000 formal removals and 2.2 million voluntary self-deportations. CIS focuses on the remaining population after the flow of new entries is subtracted.
The entire decline in the foreign-born population comes from non-citizens from Latin America who arrived after 1980—a demographic heavily overlapping with the illegal immigrant group. Conversely, the number of naturalized citizens increased by about 680,000 during this period. The sharp fall is predominantly among non-citizens who should not have been admitted.
Interior ICE removals more than tripled compared to the final months of the Biden era, while voluntary departures connected to enforcement also increased. Camarota summarized in the CIS release: “The best data we have shows an enormous decrease in the total foreign-born population, with most of the falloff among illegal immigrants.”
He added, “Regaining control of the border and robust interior enforcement has partly undone the huge increase in the illegal immigration that took place during the border surge.”
Only 44 percent of those who departed were employed workers, which helps explain why overall national employment hasn’t collapsed as corporate interests predicted. Employment among U.S.-born workers has continued to climb even as the household survey reports a decrease of just under 1.3 million immigrant workers. Certain regions—for instance, construction in South Texas mentioned by Camarota—have experienced the impact, but overall, the nation has not.
“It’s nothing to panic about,” he told The Washington Times. “First of all, we’re mostly losing low-income workers. But like anything else, it can create challenges. And it creates winners and losers.”
Those competing for jobs and housing are among the beneficiaries. “On balance, I think it’s a good deal for the country because I think most people are more worried about wages, housing prices, congestion and impact on schools and hospitals.”
Census analysts had already identified a “historic” decline in net international migration when they reported that overall population growth slowed to 0.5 percent from mid-2024 to mid-2025—a period capturing the early months of the new enforcement policies.
Camarota now predicts that the total U.S. population could soon experience an unprecedented drop, a natural consequence of the end of the artificial 8.3 million surge previously seen at the border.
For four years, media outlets insisted the border was “secure” and labeled any opposing views as bigotry. Then Joe Scarborough, while critiquing Trump’s deportation numbers on his own show, unwittingly revealed the truth.
“They should know when to take the victory. They could have been campaigning on closed southern border this whole time!” Scarborough said. He continued, “You’re never going to get the [deportation] numbers that Joe Biden had, right? You’re not going to get those numbers because Joe Biden and his administration were letting in so many illegal immigrants. It was very easy to sweep up 5,000 right on the border and send them back.”
This clip encapsulates the entire issue. Biden-era “removals” essentially operated as a revolving door along the Rio Grande. Trump shut that door. As a result, border crossings plummeted, and for the first time in decades, the population inside the country started shrinking. The same groups that dismissed this outcome as “impossible” or “racist” are now left debating methodology while the survey they typically trust reveals a 2.9 million decline.
This reduction was intentional. It occurred because the new administration recognized Temporary Protected Status as what it had become: a pathway to amnesty rather than a temporary refuge.
A leaked internal memo from late in the Biden administration, exposed in July, outlined a strategy to broaden TPS in the administration’s final days. This plan would have effectively guaranteed protection for over 3 million foreign nationals and forced the incoming administration into years of legal battles. The intent was to delay action through activist courts even after voters had opted for mass deportations.
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