This fact check originally appeared on PolitiFact.
One month since President Donald Trump was sworn in as president, the White House is touting the administrations’ successes, including a sharp drop in illegal immigration.
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“Daily illegal alien encounters plummet 95% under President Trump,” read a graphic posted Feb. 15 on the White House’s Instagram account.
An accompanying bar graph showed the number “20,086” next to a photo of former President Joe Biden and the figure “1,041” next to a photo of Trump — a 95 percent drop, a big green arrow indicated.
The post’s second slide declared another dramatic plunge: “President Trump’s border policies slash illegal alien gotaways by 93%,” it said, showing Biden’s number at “1,800” and Trump’s at “132.”
Illegal immigration at the U.S. southern border has dropped since Trump entered the White House. But the White House’s data use is misleading.
The post’s claims also overemphasize the data from a short time period; history shows immigration trends ebb and flow no matter who is in office. We won’t know the full effect of Trump’s policies compared with Biden’s until we are able to zoom out over a longer period of time. For now, it’s unclear whether any drop in illegal immigration will last or for how long.
Here are the facts.
Using two different data points inflates the drop in illegal immigration under Trump
The White House pointed us to a Fox News Instagram post that showed a chart similar to the one the Trump administration used.
Text over a photo of Biden read, “20,086 daily encounters (in the) last seven days of (the) Biden administration.” Below it, a photo of Trump was captioned “1,041 daily encounters (in the) first seven days of (the) Trump administration.”
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But, like the White House’s post, Fox News’ post is misleading. It uses the total number of border encounters for Biden’s last seven days in office and compares it with a daily average for Trump’s first seven days in office.
Here’s the data broken down, according to a Jan. 28 Fox News article that cited unpublished U.S. Customs and Border Protection data:
- Border officials encountered migrants trying to cross the U.S. southern border 20,086 times during Biden’s last seven days in office. That’s an average of 2,869 times a day.
- During Trump’s first seven days, border officials encountered migrants trying to cross the U.S. southern border 7,287 times. An average of 1,041 times a day.
That’s a 60 percent drop, not a 95 percent drop as the White House claimed in its Instagram post.
Additionally, the White House and Fox News are using encounters both at official ports of entry and between them. Under Biden’s administration, people could make appointments at official ports of entry and be legally allowed to enter the U.S. to seek asylum. Those appointments still counted as encounters, even though they did not not represent illegal immigration. Trump ended that program on his first day in office and cancelled all existing appointments.
PolitiFact reached out to U.S. Customs and Border Protection for daily January encounters data, at and between ports of entry, but the agency did not respond. The latest publicly available data is for the whole month of January.
Border Patrol Chief Michael Banks said in a Jan. 29 X post that there was a 55 percent drop in encounters between ports of entry from the seven-day-period starting Jan. 16 to the period starting Jan. 23.
Illegal immigration ebbs and flows, so it’s unclear how long any drop will last
There are important caveats to keep in mind when any administration touts illegal immigration drops.
The White House relied on seven days of immigration data to conclude that illegal immigration has plummeted because of Trump’s policies. But it’s important to zoom out and look at immigration trends over a longer period of time.
There has been a sharp drop in illegal immigration from December 2024 to January 2025. And it’s likely that Trump’s hard-on-immigration approach has played a role.
But illegal immigration has generally been dropping since March 2024. And it dropped significantly after June, when Biden implemented a policy limiting people’s ability to apply for asylum at the southwest border. For example, there were more than 137,000 encounters at the southern border in March 2024 compared to more than 47,000 in December.
Additionally, immigration experts have often told us that weather patterns, such as extremely cold or hot conditions, changes in administration and policies or political shifts in people’s home countries can affect whether someone migrates. So it’s uncertain what causes a drop or how long it will last.
During Trump’s first term, illegal immigration at the southern border dropped sharply after he entered office, similarly to what we have seen at the start of his second term. But soon after rose steadily, month after month. It went back down in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the months before Trump left office, illegal immigration was rising again.
The number of people who have evaded border officials started dropping before Trump
The second slide from the White House’s Instagram post focused on “gotaways” — a term immigration officials use to describe people who cross the border without being stopped.
But the Fox News post the White House pointed us to misleads by comparing a full year of data (1,800 gotaways per day in fiscal year 2023) to a few days or weeks of data (132 per day under Trump) — it was unclear precisely what time period under Trump that statistic referred to.
Focusing on 2023 data in particular also presents accuracy problems for the comparison.
Fox News received gotaways statistics for fiscal year 2023 after submitting a Freedom of Information Act request, its Feb. 11 article said. Although we were not able to substantiate the precise data it relied on, we know that fiscal year 2023 represented the highest rates of illegal immigration under Biden.
Official gotaways data is published once a year and represents years-old data. The most recent publicly available data is from the Department of Homeland Security’s 2022 Metrics Report, which shows fiscal year 2021 data.
Like encounters, gotaways numbers had also been steadily dropping, before Trump came into office.
A Department of Homeland Security statement Jan. 17 said the number of gotaways in fiscal year 2024 had dropped by 60 percent from the year before. That would mean, using Fox News’ gotaways data for fiscal year 2023, there were around 268,000 gotaways in 2024 or an average of 735 a day.
PolitiFact Chief Correspondent Louis Jacobson contributed to this report.
