New Data Sheds Light on What Happens to People Found Inadmissible at U.S. Ports of Entry

TRAC, Aug. 9, 2022

"People arriving at each of the more than 300 U.S. ports of entry must be inspected by Office of Field Operations (OFO) officers employed by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) before being allowed into the country. As a result of this inspection, over the past decade CBP officers working at ports of entry have determined over 3 million times that individuals before them were “inadmissible” because they lacked the proper authorization to enter the country.

Figure 1 displays a month-by-month plot of how the number of inadmissibles has varied across time, including a sharp decline as soon as President Trump assumed office in January of 2017, the drop off after the pandemic hit and Covid-Title 42 expulsions began, and the latest rise and peak of 54,212 inadmissibles in April of this year.

These data represent findings of inadmissibility at ports of entry, and do not reflect encounters by Border Patrol officers between ports of entry. These case-by-case internal agency data were analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University after being obtained through a series of Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests which TRAC has submitted monthly since 2018."