In Numbers 2026—Life After Illegal Immigration

White Papers has been publishing these In Numbers briefings for more than four years, and we are delighted to announce positive developments for the second year in a row. Prior to 2025, our reports revealed continued mass immigration and a total lack of national sovereignty. No longer is this the case.

The largest drivers of native replacement (and displacement) of Americans, illegal immigration, has not only ceased but has been thrown into reverse as millions are deported or leave the country voluntarily.

America’s culture, reflecting its changing demographics, has been radically reshaped by more than 60 years of both legal and illegal immigration. It’s only through deportation and, ultimately, a deliberate policy of Remigration that we can repair this damage.

Let’s look at the data which clearly demonstrates the radical change between the Biden and second Trump administrations.

In September of 2023 more than 341,392 immigrants were encountered at America’s borders and more than 3.2 million were encountered over the 2023 fiscal year. A further 2.9 million were encountered in 2024. Yet this does not tell the full story. The House Homeland Security Committee estimates that more than 10.8 million “irregular” aliens were admitted into the United States during the Biden administration with more than 503,000 being flown into the country, and a total of 2.4 million being admitted under the “humanitarian” parole programs vastly expanded by that administration. More than 97% of those who applied to enter the United States using the CBP One App (now the CBP HOME app) were granted permission to enter the country. Additionally, the overwhelming majority of these illegal aliens were not the poor, huddled, unfortunate women and children of Latin America but were instead single adults. In 2023 64.4% of the illegal aliens who were admitted into our country were single adults. In 2024, 61.6% were single adults. Fewer than 4% of immigrants in these years were unaccompanied minors, and less than 35% in each fiscal year were families with minor children. America was being swamped with the fighting age men, criminals, and welfare-dependent adults of the Hispanic world.

For fiscal year 2025 (our full report available here) the figures changed drastically post-inauguration. In November and December of 2025, more than 124,000 immigrants were admitted each month. But by February, the number had dropped to 81,500. In contrast, in February of 2024, more than 256,000 illegal aliens had been admitted into our country.

By June of 2025, the number of illegal aliens encountered at the US border had shrunk to 26,000 and has remained at this level ever since. Unlike the mass admissions under the Biden administration, the Trump administration has reduced the number of encounters at the border by 94% and reduced the number of illegals released into the country to as close to zero as possible. It has been reported multiple times that the US went through a 14-month consecutive period from May of 2025 to June of 2026 when not a single illegal alien was caught and then released into the interior of the United States. As far as we can tell, this is the first substantial period of time longer than mere days when an illegal alien (let alone hundreds of thousands of them) has not been admitted into our country by a president, Democrat or Republican.

Next, let’s look at deportation figures! In fiscal year 2025, the administration deported somewhere between 320,000 and 442,000 illegal aliens by way of detaining, incarcerating, and ultimately physically removing the immigrants from the country. So far in 2026, the administration has deported over 356,000 immigrants and plans to scale this substantially as new facilities designed to house more than 100,000 immigrants come into service. Indeed, the number of illegal immigrants in detention at any one time has increased substantially from roughly 40,000 in early 2025 to 70,000 by mid-2026, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Adding to the good news and reinforcing our own hopes for Remigration as opposed to simple deportations, DHS officials told Fox News in late 2025 that a further 2.2 million illegal aliens had self-deported from the US. Another estimate published by DHS in July of 2026 showed 1.4 million self-deportations, but we were unable to verify if that is an estimate from the time of inauguration or for the 2026 fiscal year.

Finally, let’s look at the CBP Home/Project Homecoming program designed to pay illegal aliens a few thousand dollars to leave the country and return to their homelands.

This is something we have long viewed as a sort of “soft launch” for a real Remigration program. Data from March of 2026 shows that more than 72,000 illegal immigrants have taken the opportunity to leave the country using this remigratory method, and tens of thousands more are believed to have been processed and are awaiting approval while the Federal government attempts to scale the program.

Altogether, somewhere between 2.8 and 3.7 million illegal aliens have been removed by the second Trump administration since inauguration day in January of 2025. If the administration scales DHS operations as it plans to and brings its range of facilities and programs fully online, it is reasonable to estimate that the administration will facilitate the removal of roughly 8.58 million illegal aliens of a total estimated illegal population of which the Center for Immigration studies estimates peaked at 16 million or 18.6 million according to the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) estimates.

These are great developments, and White Papers could not be more pleased that the 60+ year trend of mass illegal immigration into the United States has finally been reversed. However, we cannot simply settle and declare this fight over. The truth of the matter is that the United States has seen a significant increase in its post-1965 immigrant-descended population; and this has resulted in cultural transformations of huge portions of the United States beyond recognition due to demographic decline. We are hosting foreign enclaves on American soil even generations after the first post-Hart-Celler immigrants arrived.

Using data from the Migration Policy Institute, FAIR, PEW Research and Dallas Fed, we constructed a small model to estimate the number of first, second, and third generation post-1965 immigrants with illegal origins in the United States. All told, we estimate there are still 15-14 million illegal immigrants in the United States, 8.65 million people who are the children of illegal immigrants, and a further 2.5-3 million third-generation immigrants with illegal origins. This gives a total of (at bare minimum) 25 million people in the United States who are either illegal aliens themselves, or the descendants of illegal aliens who should have never been extended American citizenship regardless of what the Supreme Court may declare.

We cannot truly declare the illegal immigration crisis resolved until these individuals have been returned to their countries. Americans deserve to live in peace, prosperity, and sovereignty within our own country.