The undocumented immigrant population in the United States reached 14 million in 2023, the highest level on record, after increasing by 3.5 million over two years, but the immigrant population overall has begun to shrink.
The new estimate from the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, released Thursday, is a marked increase in previous figures of around 11 million attached to the undocumented population, but researchers have found that it has begun falling as President Donald Trump implements his hard-line immigration agenda.
“The other big takeaway is that, at least as of ’23, a very large share of this unauthorized immigrant population, over 40 percent, actually had legal statuses that protected them from immediate deportation,” Jeff Passel, senior demographer at Pew Research Center, told Newsweek ahead of the report’s release.
“They had mostly temporary statuses, but they did have legal statuses that meant they could stay in the country and a lot of them had permission to work legally.”
How Is the Immigrant Population Changing?
After more than half a century of steady growth, the United States is experiencing its first decline in immigrant population since the 1960s.
In January 2025, a record 53.3 million immigrants lived in the country, accounting for 15.8 percent of the population. But by June, departures and deportations outpaced new arrivals, reducing the immigrant population to 51.9 million, or 15.4 percent of all U.S. residents.
The Pew Research Center, which tracks immigration trends using U.S. Census Bureau data, notes that the downturn may partly reflect technical issues such as declining survey response rates among immigrant households. But enforcement actions, reduced asylum claims, and shifts in migration patterns are clear factors in this historic reversal.
These views mirror those from other experts who spoke to Newsweek following a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announcement that 1.6 million illegal immigrants had left the U.S. since January, based on preliminary research from the Center for Immigration Studies.
As part of that announcement, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said the news was “massive,” although she did not cite official Department of Homeland Security data to back up the news.
“This means safer streets, taxpayer savings, pressure off schools and hospital services and better job opportunities for Americans,” Noem said in a press release on August 14.
Is White House Policy Having an Effect?

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Michael M. Santiago/ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP/Getty Images
The shift comes as Trump ramps up pressure on his administration to remove millions of migrants without legal status as he looks to fulfill his campaign pledge of mass deportations.
It follows several significant policy changes. In June 2024, then-President Joe Biden imposed new restrictions on asylum applications, sharply reducing border encounters. When Trump returned to office in January 2025, he moved quickly with 181 executive actions in his first 100 days, to effectively shut down asylum deter migration and ramp up arrests as well as deportations.
While the full impact of these measures remains to be seen, they are already contributing to the decline, especially among undocumented immigrants, according to Pew.
“We can’t directly tie it to the deportations and the policy changes, but there’s undoubtedly some relationship,” Passel said. “Whether the real decline is as much as what we are seeing just by comparing two data points, that we don’t know.”
A Changing Labor Market
In 2023, the number of unauthorized immigrants in the workforce reached a record of 9.7 million, Pew found, up from 7.8 million in 2021. That high represented around 5.6 percent of the total U.S. workforce.
The biggest industries for undocumented workers were construction, agriculture, leisure, and hospitality. All of these industries have raised concerns in some way or another over Trump’s America-first policies and the rhetoric surrounding immigration throughout 2024 and into the new administration.
The labor force has felt the effects. Immigrants, legal and illegal, who made up 20 percent of U.S. workers at the beginning of the year, represented 19 percent by June, a drop of more than 750,000 workers, Pew found.
While Trump has repeatedly indicated that he was looking to find a solution for farming and hospitality, two industries heavily reliant on undocumented labor, no official announcements have been made, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids have continued.
Where Are Undocumented Immigrants Living?
“The top six states where the unauthorized immigrants live have basically been the top six states going back until as far as at least 1980 and maybe even further,” Passel said.
Texas and Florida saw rapid growth in the past few years, now sitting at around 2.1 million and 1.6 million, respectively, while California leads with 2.3 million.
Pew found that the unauthorized population has become less concentrated over the past forty years, with 32 states seeing the population group grow between 2021 and 2023.
Florida (+700,000)Texas (+450,000)California (+425,000)New York (+230,000)
Eight other states saw their unauthorized immigrant populations grow by more than 75,000: New Jersey, Illinois, Georgia, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Ohio.
Despite this, New York was among six states that were home to fewer undocumented immigrants in 2023 than in 2007, the previous peak. The others were Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico, and Oregon.
Passel told Newsweek that despite the slight changes in numbers in recent years, and even months, immigrants continue to make up around 15 percent of the U.S. population, in a nation that has had various support for the idea that it is a nation of immigrants.
“There’s always been kind of a theme about immigration and it’s fairly consistent if you look through history and through the press and through commentary: that the immigrants that came before were the good immigrants, and the immigrants coming today are different and we won’t be able to absorb them,” Passel said. “You hear that today and you heard that 100 years ago, or 125 years ago.”
Whether the downward trend in immigrants in the U.S. continues long term or not remains to be seen, with Passel making it clear that 2025 data remains preliminary and subject to change.