The charge came at Wednesday's NATO press conference: '25 million people, I think more than that, under Biden' crossed the border [1]. Twenty-five million is not a throwaway line. It is the factual predicate for the border emergency - the scale offered to justify the deportation campaign, the expedited removals, the extraordinary powers. A predicate that size should survive contact with the government's own records.
It does not. Customs and Border Protection - the agency that counts - recorded under 11 million nationwide encounters through December 2024, the end of the Biden term [1]. Border officials also estimate roughly 2.2 million gotaways, people detected but not stopped. Add every one of them and the total sits near 13 million [1]. The claim is not rounding up. It is nearly double the most generous version of the count.
The count itself is more generous than the claim deserves. An encounter is an event, not a person. A migrant stopped three times is three encounters and one human being, and expulsions during the pandemic years produced exactly that kind of repeat counting [1]. The 11 million figure is a ceiling on events, not a census of people who entered and stayed. The real number of individuals is smaller still.
The record then reads as follows. Claimed: 25 million people, possibly more. Recorded: under 11 million encounters, about 13 million with every estimated gotaway included, with the true count of unique persons below that. CNN's fact-check put it plainly: nowhere close [1][2].
The verdict matters beyond the arithmetic. Emergency powers are priced by the size of the emergency. A government that claims 25 million when its own ledger shows 11 million is not describing a crisis. It is manufacturing the scale of one, and every extraordinary measure sold on that scale - every removal without a hearing, every court order tested - inherits the inflation. The border can be a serious policy problem at 11 million encounters. The Constitution does not have an asterisk for imaginary ones.
