Did Biden "Open" the Southern Border? Fact-Checking the Claim

The Better Question

The phrase "opened the border" implies that a gate once shut was swung wide and left unguarded. That did not happen. What did happen is that the Biden administration deliberately reversed a set of Trump-era enforcement mechanisms, changed enforcement priorities, and — particularly in its first year — faced an operational surge it did not fully control. The useful question is not yes-or-no, but what specifically changed, what did not, and what drove the record encounter volumes.

This matters because framing the issue as "open vs. closed" forecloses the factual record. During the four Biden fiscal years (FY2021–FY2024), CBP recorded roughly 10.8 million total encounters at the southern border, numbers that would have been unthinkable in the pre-Biden decade.^[9] But those same four years also saw more than 2.5 million Title 42 expulsions, a record 271,000 deportations in FY2024, and two major policy reversals where Biden himself tightened the border. Both facts belong in the same frame.

What Biden Reversed on Day 1

On January 20, 2021, Biden signed a cluster of executive orders and proclamations that dismantled the core architecture of Trump's immigration enforcement posture.^[1]

The Migrant Protection Protocols reversal is the policy critics most frequently point to when using the "open border" label. Under MPP, roughly 81,000 asylum seekers had been returned to Mexico to await U.S. immigration hearings, a practice that significantly deterred irregular crossing. Ending it (without a ready substitute) removed a meaningful bottleneck on Day 1.

Changing ICE's interior enforcement priorities had a different, quieter effect: communities that had lived under threat of deportation regardless of prior criminal record no longer faced that exposure, and data show a measurable drop in interior deportations in the early Biden years. Critics argued this sent a signal that reduced the perceived cost of irregular entry. Those arguments deserve serious weight, which is why this verdict is Misleading and not False.

Enforcement That Continued

Much of what critics described as "opening the border" was, in enforcement terms, the removal of amplifiers while leaving the base infrastructure in place. The base infrastructure continued operating throughout Biden's term.

That's the core enforcement reality the "open border" framing leaves out. An administration that expelled over 2.5 million people at the border did not leave that border "open." The critics' accurate claim is that Biden expelled fewer people per encounter than Trump did under Title 42 (roughly 51% at the peak vs. over 80% under Trump), and that the remaining encounters were increasingly processed and released pending immigration hearings — an enforcement gap, but not the absence of enforcement.

On deportations, the picture is also more complex than the "open border" charge implies. Biden's deportation totals started low (FY2021: approximately 59,000 removals, partly because of pandemic disruption and court-blocked policies) then climbed steadily.^[2] By FY2024, ICE completed 271,484 deportations — the highest figure in a decade.^[12] Over Biden's full term, deportation volumes were roughly comparable to Trump's first term totals.

Border enforcement infrastructure also remained intact. Approximately 20,000 Border Patrol agents remained deployed throughout Biden's presidency.^[7] Hundreds of miles of existing fencing and surveillance towers continued operating. The Cato Institute, writing from a libertarian and generally pro-immigration perspective, documented that Biden was on track to admit fewer than 10,000 refugees in his first year (a historically low ceiling), and that despite narrative claims about open access, the administration "smashed all records for immediate expulsions without due process."^[4]

The Numbers in Context

The Biden era produced encounter volumes without recent precedent. Total CBP encounters from FY2021 through FY2024 reached roughly 10.8 million, compared to approximately 3 million nationwide across all four Trump years (FY2017–FY2020).^[9] FY2023 set a single-year record.

The chart shows a dramatic surge that coincided with Biden's first year in office and continued rising. What it cannot show is causation. Border encounter volumes reflect a mix of policy signals and structural forces operating on both sides of the border simultaneously. In the years Biden took office, Venezuela's economy had contracted by more than 75% since 2013, the largest non-conflict economic collapse in nearly half a century.^[10] The Northern Triangle countries were recovering from two back-to-back hurricanes in 2020 that devastated agricultural regions where roughly a quarter of the workforce depends on farming.^[8] Post-COVID mobility surged worldwide.

These push factors do not excuse Biden's policy choices or the operational failures at the border. But attributing the entire surge to his policies overstates what the evidence supports. Countries to the south of the US (Panama, Costa Rica, Mexico) also recorded record migration flows during the same years, driven by the same displacement pressures.

Steelman: The Case for "Opened the Border"

The Frame Problem

The "open border" charge is partly a political category, a term that in Republican usage means "more permissive than what we would have done" rather than literally no enforcement. By that definition, any Democratic immigration policy is an "open border." PolitiFact found that immigration experts consistently declined to call Biden's approach "open borders," noting that the border has never had fewer than 15,000–20,000 agents, hundreds of miles of fencing, or active deportation proceedings at any point in recent decades.^[7]

"Unrestricted illegal immigration" is the part of the claim that fails most cleanly on the evidence. Over Biden's four years, millions of people were expelled, deported, or turned away. The people released into the interior with Notices to Appear were released into a legal process; they were in the immigration system, not outside it. "Unrestricted" means no restrictions apply. That description fits none of the four years of Biden's presidency.

The accurate version of the claim: Biden reversed Trump's most aggressive enforcement mechanisms, changed enforcement priorities toward processing over expulsion, and presided over record-high encounter volumes that reflected both those policy shifts and major structural push factors. Whether that combination constitutes "opening" the border is a political judgment, not a factual one. The factual record is that enforcement never stopped, that Biden himself recognized the posture was insufficient and corrected it in 2024, and that calling the result "unrestricted" is not supported by what the data shows.