Policy Tracker

Illegal entry across the southern border has dropped to its lowest level in over 50 years. 12,901 encounters were recorded at the southern border in June 2026, with an estimated 2,000 entries into the country. The number of entries has dropped from a high of about 140,000 a month in December 2023 under the Biden Administration. Border Patrol released zero illegal immigrants into the country every month from May 2025 onward, a streak that reached 14 consecutive months in June 2026. Known gotaways, the people detected crossing but not caught, ran above 2,000 a day at the 2023 peak and now run under 50 a day nationwide.

For the first time since the 2021 border surge began, most new illegal presence comes from visa overstays rather than illegal border crossings.

Since January 2025, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has arrested 145,000 illegal immigrants who already held a criminal conviction. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reports there have been around 856,000 deportations in that same period, not to include another 1.9 million self-deportations. Roughly 55,000 of those convictions were violent: 43,000 for assault, 5,400 for sexual assault, 2,700 for robbery and 2,100 for homicide. Another 90,000 were serious non-violent, including 30,000 for DUI, 22,600 for drug offenses and 6,100 for weapons charges. More than 7,000 gang members were taken in, among them MS-13 and Tren de Aragua members, along with 1,538 known or suspected terrorists, 1,534 of whom have since been removed.

About 435,000 illegal immigrants with criminal convictions are still on the ICE non-detained docket, including roughly 15,000 tied to homicide, 20,000 to sexual assault and 105,000 to assault.

The number of foreigners given a temporary visa (i.e. H-1B Visa, student visa, etc) has gone down by 7.8%, from 8.2 million in 2024, to 7.6 million in 2025, to an estimated 7.0 million in 2026. The number of foreigners given a Green Card (permanent visa) has gone down by 16% to 22%, from 1,356,760 in 2024, to 1,320,080 in 2025, to an estimated 1 to 1.1 million in 2026. Refugee admissions have gone down by about 90%, from 100,034 in 2024 to 38,102 in 2025, with 7,730 admitted through June 2026 against a ceiling cut from 125,000 to 7,500.

Recommendation: Write the cut into law. A replacement for the 1990 Act should lower the annual cap to about 200,000, in line with the 1924-to-1965 average, eliminate the Diversity Visa lottery, and narrow family-based green cards to spouses and minor children. Legislation is the only thing that turns a one-administration win into a reduction that lasts, as the 1924 Act did for 41 years.

The H-1B visa is a temporary visa given to foreign workers in what the law calls a specialty occupation, meaning any job that requires a bachelor's degree. A worker is tied to a sponsoring employer, and once the visa status expires, it has to be renewed or it is revoked.

The Trump administration has imposed a $100,000 fee on each new H-1B petition (imposed by executive order in September 2025) and a wage-weighted lottery. The $100,000 fee has been voided by a Federal Judge as of June 2026 but the lottery has been in effect since February 2026.

This section is harder to measure because there is no fixed target number - the goal is straightforward: if immigration fraud is found, it leads to arrests and/or denaturalization.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has completed 19,300 fraud cases with a 65% fraud confirmation rate and has made 33,000+ referrals to ICE Homeland Security Investigations (138% increase). Operation Twin Shield examined 1,000+ cases in Minneapolis-St. Paul, finding fraud or security concerns in 44% of interviews. USCIS has flagged 182 confirmed national security risks and issued a record 196,000 notices to appear in 2025.

Denaturalization has now accelerated sharply. The federal government historically filed fewer than one civil denaturalization suit a month (average of 0.6/month). In May 2026 it filed 15, and 18 more in the first twelve days of June. TRAC, the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, which obtains federal case records through Freedom of Information Act requests, counts 166 complaints in total between 2008 and June 12, 2026, which means roughly a fifth of everything filed in eighteen years came in those six weeks. USCIS field offices have been directed to supply 100 to 200 cases a month. Operation Janus is the government program that hunts for people who became citizens despite having been ordered deported under a different name. It began in 2008 after a border officer found 206 immigrants who had final deportation orders but had reused new identities to win green cards and citizenship. USCIS later discovered roughly 315,000 naturalization files where the fingerprints were never digitized or did not match - meaning the criminal-background check behind those citizenships was never verified. That backlog is the pool Janus is now working through. The DOJ issued a June 2025 memo directing attorneys to "maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings," but the legal process is slow: stripping citizenship requires the government to win a separate federal lawsuit for each person.

Documented fraud patterns include: Feeding Our Future ($350M+, 65 convicted of 79 charged, founder Aimee Bock sentenced to 41 years 8 months), Chinese marriage fraud rings (11 charged in Navy sham marriage scheme), Indian H-1B visa fraud (Infosys $34M settlement), and Cuban asylum fraud ($18M smuggling ring, 12 indicted) (see broader list below).

The U.S. has imposed a full travel ban on 19 countries (all visa types blocked): Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Burma (Myanmar), Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Laos, Libya, Mali, Niger, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. An additional 19 countries face partial restrictions (immigrant visas + tourist/student visas blocked): Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Benin, Burundi, Cote d'Ivoire, Cuba, Dominica, Gabon, The Gambia, Malawi, Mauritania, Nigeria, Senegal, Tanzania, Togo, Tonga, Venezuela, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Separately, 75 countries have had immigrant visa (green card) processing frozen indefinitely as of January 2026 - since a green card is the only path to U.S. citizenship, this effectively blocks permanent immigration from these nations.

Recommendation: The three tiers now reach 90 distinct countries - a substantial restriction, but one built almost entirely on executive authority. Section 212(f) is a presidential discretion, and the public-charge freeze is a State Department interpretation; a future administration could lift either on its first day. The durable step is to write the country-level distribution into law, alongside a replacement for the 1990 Immigration Act that lowers the annual cap to roughly 200,000 and eliminates the Diversity Visa lottery. The 1924 Immigration Act set both its country distribution and its volume by law, and it held across both parties for 41 years; an executive proclamation lasts only until the next administration reverses it.

Foreign citizens and foreign governments own about 45.8 million acres of American farmland - roughly 3.4% of all privately-owned farmland in the country. They also buy an average of about 100,000 existing U.S. homes a year, worth around $56 billion, based on the 2020-2024 average tracked by the National Association of Realtors.

The 100,000 buyers split into two groups, both of them non-citizens. A little over half live in the United States - recent immigrants who have been here less than two years, or people on temporary visas such as H-1B work visas and student visas. These buyers mostly purchase a single-family house in the suburbs to live in. The rest live abroad and never move here. They buy U.S. homes as vacation properties or rental investments, and most pay all cash. Neither group has to be a citizen, and the federal government sets no requirement that a buyer hold a green card or live in the country.

Washington does nothing to stop any of it. The only federal law on foreign farmland, passed in 1978, just requires foreign owners to report what they own - it bans no purchase. Twenty-eight states have written their own restrictions, most aimed at China and other hostile governments.

Recommendation: Lawful permanent resident status (green card) should be the minimum to purchase any U.S. real estate. Foreign-state entities and sovereign wealth funds should be barred entirely. Existing foreign-owned property should be divested within one year of legislative enactment. A separate Center article will cover the full mechanism and constitutional questions.