Immigration laws & enforcement

Four questions. Four different measures.

01 · Legal pathways

How legal immigration works

There is no single application that anyone can submit simply because they want to move here. A person must qualify under a particular category; many categories also have numerical limits, waits, and admissibility requirements.

USCIS: green card eligibility categories · USCIS: asylum · State Department: diversity visa selection

From eligibility to permission

1. Qualify: identify the category and any required sponsor or petition.
2. Apply and wait: meet documentation, screening, visa-availability, and other requirements.
3. Complete the appropriate process: immigrant-visa processing abroad, or adjustment of status inside the U.S. if eligible. Not everyone already here can adjust.
4. Separate later steps: permanent residence and eventual naturalization are different decisions.

State Department: visa expiration and authorized stay · USCIS: green card eligibility categories

Parole, deferred action, and temporary protections are not interchangeable with permanent residence. Work authorization is another separate question. See hiring and work authorization and becoming a citizen.

02 · Status & violations

How people become undocumented

8 U.S.C. §1325: improper entry · State Department: visa expiration and authorized stay · USCIS: immigration status and authorized stay

03 · Enforcement

Who does what—and what happens next?

1. Encounter or investigation: officers assess identity, immigration history, and possible grounds for enforcement.
2. Processing decision: the person may be detained, released under conditions, placed in court proceedings, or processed through another authorized procedure.
3. Decision and possible protection: ordinary removal proceedings permit contesting the case and requesting qualifying relief. Expedited removal and reinstatement of prior orders follow different procedures; not every case receives a full immigration-court hearing.
4. Outcome: relief or lawful status may be granted, proceedings may end on other grounds, or a removal order may be issued and carried out. An order and a completed removal are not the same event.

DOJ: immigration proceedings and relief · 8 U.S.C. §1229a: removal proceedings · 8 U.S.C. §1225: inspection and expedited removal

DOJ: pro bono legal service providers · ICE: delegated authority under 287(g)

What can a president change?

Administrations influence enforcement priorities, staffing, detention use, regulations, diplomacy, and agency implementation within legal limits. Congress controls statutes and appropriations; courts can constrain policies. Migration also responds to violence, jobs, family ties, foreign governments, and global events. A total recorded during a presidency does not establish that the president alone caused it.

See the immigration history timeline for the laws and political decisions behind these changes.

Compare administrations

Permanent residence & enforcement

Choose totals or annual averages to compare the figures. These are fiscal-year groupings, not exact inauguration-to-inauguration counts. Transition years include activity under two presidents.

Totals with annual averages below.

Returns include administrative returns as well as enforcement returns where separately reported. Do not call all of them formal deportations. Earlier return categories were not separated; the administrative category’s coverage also changed over time. Differences in procedures and counting limit comparisons.

FY2025 straddles Biden and Trump. The verified border count appears below, but an equivalent full-year DHS-wide removal/return breakdown was not established in this review. Title 42 is marked “Not applicable” outside FY2020–2023. Missing values are not zeros; ICE-only figures and press-release totals are not substituted here.

DHS 2022 Yearbook, Tables 1, 6 and 39 · OHSS DHS repatriations · Archived DHS repatriation table, January 1, 2026

Explore the data

One dataset at a time

Choose a measure and decade below. Recent years appear first; every year back to 1970 remains available. The border table counts encounters between ports on the Southwest border; it excludes other borders, airport arrivals, and undetected entries.

56 fiscal years in the combined dataset.

Understanding the gaps

How many people entered without authorization?

There is no complete observed count. Border events, estimated undetected entries, overstays, and the resident unauthorized population answer different questions. They cannot be added together to create a clean “illegal entrants by president” total.

CBO: demographic outlook and migration estimates · DHS FY2023 Entry/Exit Overstay Report · SSA: measuring the unauthorized immigrant population

About the evidence

Sources, calculations & limits

• Historical removals and returns: FY1970–2014 from the 2022 DHS Yearbook, Table 39. All returns were placed in the enforcement-return column through FY2008; “all returns” here preserves their sum. Later administrative returns are added to enforcement returns.
• Recent removals and returns: FY2015–2024 from the OHSS repatriation table captured January 1, 2026. Its revised counts replace older overlapping values and are rounded to tens. Combining vintages can create small differences from other published administration totals.
• Permanent residence: FY1970–1972 checked against the 2018 Table 1 because the 2022 PDF’s historical column has inconsistent year/value pairings. FY1973–2022 uses the 2022 Yearbook; the FY2013–2022 split comes from Table 6. FY2023–2024 uses the newer annual reports.
• Border data: CBP’s historical Southwest sector table through FY2018, then the CBP series reproduced by Pew through FY2025. The source’s label changed from apprehensions to encounters when Title 42 began. This series does not count ports-of-entry encounters.
• Calculations: administration totals sum the listed fiscal years. Annual averages divide by covered year-equivalents and round to a whole number. There is no causal ranking, undocumented-entry total, or claim that the summed events are unique people.
• Coverage: the legal overview describes the framework. This is not a live tracker of every 2026 executive action, court order, visa suspension, or individual eligibility rule.

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