The population of illegal immigrants in the US has dropped by an estimated 1 million since President Trump returned to the White House in January, according to a new report from the Center for Immigration Studies.
The decline occurred between January and May as Trump ushered in a new mass deportation campaign and border lockdown, according to the report, which analyzed a household survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
And it’s “perhaps due to their leaving in response to President Trump’s election and stepped-up enforcement effort,” the report noted.
There were an estimated 14.8 million illegal immigrants roaming the US in May, according to CIS’ estimate.
In January, CIS estimated that there were 15.4 million illegal immigrants in the United States, which jumped 50% as the Biden administration released record numbers of border jumpers into the country.
Many of the illegal immigrants left on their own as Trump pushed them to “self-deport,” CIS fellow Andrew Arthur noted in a recent op-ed for The Post.
The Trump administration launched the CBP Home app in March to allow illegal immigrants to volunteer to leave the country on their own without facing any consequences.
The White House also began paying for illegal immigrants’ commercial flights home with an additional $1,000 payment for going back to their native countries.
The massive drop is largely attributed to a 1.07 million “falloff” in the population of non-citizens from Latin America who arrived in 1980 or later, which “overlaps significantly with illegal immigrants,” Steven Camarota, who co-authored the report, told The Post.
The number of foreign-born workers also dropped by 601,000 from January to May, according to the study.
The total foreign-born population dropped 957,000 from January to May, which is “one of the largest declines over a four-month period in the foreign-born in the last three decades, but it is not unprecedented,” according to the report.
It also noted that it’s possible that some undocumented immigrants didn’t participate in the survey, fearing that they could be swept up in Trump’s immigration raids as a result of sharing their status with the federal government.
