Unauthorized immigrant population hit record 14M in 2023: Pew analysis

The big picture: Leading up to the 2024 election, polls showed increasing support for mass deportations — even among Latino voters — as more migrants from around the world sought to cross into the U.S. illegally and then seek asylum.

By the numbers: The number of unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. reached the all-time high of 14 million after two consecutive years of record growth, according to Pew Research Center estimates released Thursday.

• The number of unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. who were born in countries other than Mexico grew from 6.4 million to 9.7 million from 2021 to 2023, Pew reported.
• More than 12 million unauthorized immigrants in 2023 had previously entered the U.S. illegally or overstayed a visa, the report found. Another 2 million entered the U.S. legally and were paroled or released into the country as many of them awaited court decisions on asylum claims or other efforts to stay in the country permanently.

Zoom in: The jump in immigration in 2023 came after President Biden dropped some of Trump's pre-pandemic immigration restrictions and migrants returned to the U.S.-Mexico border, overwhelming federal and local officials.

• Nearly 82,000 migrants from around the world traveled through the dangerous Darién Gap from Colombia into Panama in August 2023, highlighting the waves of migrants heading toward the U.S.
• Economic upheaval and violence in Africa, Asia, and Latin America — and the perception that Biden's lifting of immigration barriers would make it easy to enter the U.S. — helped drive unprecedented migration, analysts say.

The report's tally of unauthorized immigrants included those who were in the U.S. with some protections from deportation.

• About 6 million immigrants without full legal status had some protection from deportation in 2023, up from 2.7 million in 2021.
• In 2007, when the undocumented immigrant population hit its previous peak of 12.2 million, only about 500,000 had some protection from deportation.

The intrigue: Early data show that the number of unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. continued to rise in 2024, but dropped earlier this year as the second Trump administration began immigration raids and ended many protections, Pew said.

What they're saying: "Promises made. Promises kept," White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told Axios when asked about the Pew report.

Between the lines: Some immigrant rights groups are likely to take issue with Pew for including immigrants with some protections in its calculation of unauthorized immigrants.

• For example, Indian national and truck driver Harjinder Singh was arrested on charges of vehicular homicide after the deaths of three people in Florida last week.
• The 28-year-old entered the country illegally in 2018, and the Department of Homeland Security called him a "criminal illegal alien."
• Yet Singh had a pending asylum case before the accident, which had allowed him to obtain a federal work permit. The Pew study would count him among the unauthorized in 2023.

Yes, but: Those semantics don't matter to the general public since all voters saw was a massive rise in "unauthorized immigrants," Mike Madrid, a California GOP political consultant and frequent Trump critic, told Axios.

• "All of that goes to say this is a shocking failure of the Biden-Harris administration to control the border situation, and the political denials it obviously exacerbated."
• Madrid said the immigration numbers from 2023 reflect a decades-long failure to fix a broken immigration system that hasn't been revamped since the 1980s.

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