U.S. immigrant population down for first time in a century

© Public Domain Potential immigrants in queue Biden-era "removals" were a revolving door at the Rio Grande. Trump closed the door. Crossings collapsed. A new Center for Immigration Studies [CIS] 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. 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. He told The Washington Times: "We've never seen anything quite like this before. This is big and sustained, as best as we can tell. 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 f oreign-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. "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. Camarota told the Times: "It's nothing to panic about. 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! 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." 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.