2.3 Million Illegals Gone: America’s Immigrant Population Plummets For First Time In A Century

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,

The numbers the open-borders crowd swore were impossible are now in black and white.

A new Center for Immigration Studies analysis of the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey finds the illegal immigrant population has fallen by about 2.3 million since President Trump returned to office in January 2025. Another 600,000 legal immigrants have left. The total foreign-born population is down 2.9 million.

That is the first sustained drop in America’s immigrant population in nearly a hundred years.

?? BREAKING — IT’S OFFICIAL: The illegal alien population in the United States has DROPPED by 2,300,000 under President Trump.

Another 600,000 LEGAL immigrants have LEFT the country, marking the largest reduction in the U.S. Immigrant population in a CENTURY!

“We are seeing… pic.twitter.com/xVkO8Y6OCk

— The Patriot Oasis™ (@ThePatriotOasis) September 4, 2026

CIS research director Steven A. Camarota and demographer Karen Zeigler tracked the government’s monthly household survey from January 2025 through July 2026. The foreign-born total – naturalized citizens, lawful permanent residents, long-term temporary visitors and illegal immigrants – fell from roughly 53.3 million to 50.5 million.

Camarota’s preliminary estimate puts the illegal population at 13.5 million in July, down from 15.8 million when Trump took the oath.

“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 added: “It is a fundamental change, and it’s profound.”

The same dataset shows what happened during the Biden years. From January 2021 to January 2025 the foreign-born population jumped 8.3 million – the largest four-year increase in American history.

Catch-and-release, mass parole, asylum abuse and a wide-open southern border did exactly what critics said they would do. The survey now shows that surge going into reverse.

CIS is not counting plane seats. It is measuring net change: new arrivals minus deportations, voluntary departures, legalizations and deaths. That is why the 2.3 million illegal decline can sit beside larger Homeland Security departure figures.

At the one-year mark of Trump’s second term, DHS said nearly 3 million illegal immigrants had left the country, including about 675,000 formal removals and 2.2 million self-deportations. CIS is looking at who is still here after new arrivals are subtracted.

Latin American non-citizens who arrived in 1980 or later account for the entire drop in the foreign-born count. That group overlaps heavily with the illegal population. Naturalized-citizen numbers actually rose by about 680,000 over the same stretch. The collapse is among non-citizens who should not have been waved in.

Interior ICE removals more than tripled compared with the tail end of the Biden term. Voluntary departures tied to enforcement jumped as well. Camarota put it simply 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 left were workers. That goes some way to explain why the national jobs numbers have not imploded the way corporate lobbyists predicted. U.S.-born employment has continued to rise even as immigrant workers in the household survey fell by a little less than 1.3 million. Some regional pockets – construction in South Texas is the example Camarota cited – have felt it. The country as a whole has not.

“It’s nothing to panic about,” he told the 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.”

Workers competing for jobs and housing are the winners. “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 flagged a “historic” drop in net international migration when they reported that overall population growth slowed to 0.5 percent from mid-2024 to mid-2025 – a window that captured only the first months of the new enforcement regime.

Camarota now says the country’s total population is likely heading toward an unprecedented decline. That is what happens when an 8.3 million artificial surge is no longer being pumped through the border.

The media spent four years insisting the border was “secure” and that anyone who noticed otherwise was a bigot. Then Joe Scarborough, trying to score points on Trump’s deportation totals, walked straight into the truth on his own show.

“They should know when to take the victory. They could have been campaigning on closed southern border this whole time!” Scarborough said. Then: “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.”

Nobody cornered him. He said it unprompted.

That is the whole scam in one clip. Biden-era “removals” were a revolving door at the Rio Grande. Trump closed the door. Crossings collapsed. The population inside the country started falling for the first time in a generation. The same networks that called that outcome “impossible” or “racist” are now reduced to quibbling over methodology while the survey they usually treat as gospel shows a 2.9 million decline.

The drop did not happen by accident. It happened because the new administration treated Temporary Protected Status as what it had become: a backdoor amnesty, not a temporary shelter.

A late Biden-era internal memo, exposed in July, laid out a plan to expand TPS in the final days of that presidency in a way that would have locked in de facto protection for more than 3 million foreign nationals and boxed the incoming administration into years of litigation. The scheme was designed to run out the clock through activist courts after voters had already chosen mass deportations.

Trump’s team has been ripping that wiring out. The Supreme Court cleared the path to end TPS for Haitians and Syrians. Extensions that were never meant to be permanent are being terminated where the statute allows. The people who wrote that memo were not confused about the election result. They were trying to cancel it with paperwork.

Once TPS for Haitians lapsed, ICE moved from roughly one deportation flight a month to a weekly schedule. Internal documents reported by The New York Times described the ramp-up after the Court allowed the humanitarian program to be cancelled. Flights into Cap-Haïtien have already carried criminals alongside other removable aliens. DHS has publicly flagged deportees with records that include sex crimes involving children.

The press response was automatic. Outlets that spent years ignoring gang control of Port-au-Prince suddenly discovered Haiti the week shackled men appeared on a Homeland Security video walking onto a plane. The spin is always the same: enforcement is the crisis, not the policy that imported hundreds of thousands of people the statute never contemplated as permanent residents.

Haiti is violent. That is not an argument for turning Temporary Protected Status into a forever visa. It is an argument for not running a four-year parole-and-release machine that dumped the consequences on Springfield, New York, and South Florida while daring anyone to notice.

The same enforcement machine is now using third-country removals for people whose home governments will not take them back, or who have withholding orders that bar return to a specific country but not removal from the United States.

Over a ten-day stretch in late August, internal documents obtained by CBS News showed three ICE flights carrying more than 100 deportees to eight African countries: Burundi, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Eswatini, Liberia, Rwanda and Sierra Leone. Nationals on those flights included people from Afghanistan, Cuba, Nicaragua, Iran, Nepal, Turkey and Venezuela – not just Africans being sent “home.”

Liberia has publicly agreed to take a large number of third-country deportees. Equatorial Guinea has already received dozens. Rights groups and legacy outlets have filled pages with horror copy about Level 4 travel advisories and “chain refoulement.” What they will not say is why these flights exist: years of catch-and-release created a population of people with final orders who cannot be dumped back on a country that refuses the plane.

If a judge bars return to Caracas or Kabul, that order is about that country. It is not a lifetime lease in Houston. The prior administration built the backlog. This one is draining it.

DHS, asked for comment on the Times piece, sent an earlier release on collapsed border crossings. That is the other half of the story. You cannot shrink a 15.8 million illegal population if 10,000 more people walk in every week. Trump stopped the inflow first. Then he started removing the stock.

For four years the line was that immigration was a force of nature. “Root causes.” Climate. Violence. Poverty. Anything except the obvious: if you fly people in, parole them, hand them a court date years out and dare ICE to find them in a sanctuary city, they stay. If you seal the border, end the parole pipelines, revoke the TPS expansions and put officers in the interior, they leave.

Jim Jordan put the prior era in one sentence at a recent hearing: a systematic plan to open the border, park millions in sanctuary jurisdictions, and then starve the agency that removes them. Voters watched it. They voted against it. The CPS is now recording the result.

The remaining illegal population is still enormous. CIS’s 13.5 million is a decline, not a victory lap. DHS has used higher starting estimates than CIS. Either way, millions of people with no right to be in the US are still there. The difference is that the direction of travel has changed for the first time since the Depression.

Employers who built business models on an endless supply of illegal labor will complain. School districts that padded enrollment will complain. NGOs that lived on the casework will complain. Networks that spent half a decade calling enforcement a moral panic will complain loudest of all, then run another Haiti-video segment and call it news.

The households competing for apartments, emergency-room beds and entry-level wages are not complaining. They are watching the first government in a generation treat the immigration statutes as if they were written to be enforced.

America is not a holding pen for the Western Hemisphere. It is not a third-country processing hub with a welfare office attached. The survey data now shows what happens when a president acts like that is true: the illegal population falls, legal inflows tighten, and the foreign-born total drops by millions in eighteen months.

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