Why "30 or 40 Million" Border Crossers Is False - Cato, CIS and Heritage All Say 5-7M

A claim on The Benny Show put 30 to 40 million "unvetted, unvaccinated" border crossers under Biden, "all military aged males." We rate it false - truth score 0.07, confidence 0.90.

Cato (libertarian), the Center for Immigration Studies (restrictionist) and Heritage - who agree on nothing else in immigration policy - all put the net increase at roughly 5 to 7 million.

Episode 22:27. The claim was said on July 27, 2026, on "LIVE With Acting Legend James Woods Right Now Going Scorched Earth on COLLAPSE Of California," at 4:55. One caveat we say out loud: the timestamp lands on James Woods's turn, but the transcript excerpt we hold for that turn is about Gavin Newsom and does not contain the line. We have not resolved the attribution from our own material.

We steelman the grievance at full strength before landing the verdict. The 2021-2024 border was historically unprecedented: the Republican-led House Homeland Security Committee counted 10.8 million CBP encounters across FY2021-FY2024, about 8.7 million at the southwest border. CBP estimates roughly 2 million known gotaways - people detected but never apprehended, uncounted by construction. The DHS Inspector General found CBP released a migrant who was on a terrorist watchlist, and 385 watchlist encounters occurred between ports of entry since FY2021, including 169 in FY2023 alone. All of that is documented and none of it is in dispute here.

What fails is the arithmetic and the quantifier. Encounters are events, not people - the same person turned back three times counts three times, and recidivism ran 11-27%. Pew puts the entire unauthorized population, including people who arrived decades ago, at a record 14 million in 2023; the claim asserts 30-40 million arrived in four years. "All military aged males" is contradicted by the same House factsheet that supplies the 10.8 million: of 8.7 million southwest encounters, 2.66 million were family-unit members and 546,255 were unaccompanied children - over a third. Women are 46% of the unauthorized population. And the COVID vaccination requirement behind "unvaccinated" applied to immigrant-visa and green-card applicants going through legal consular processing, not to people crossing between ports of entry; the CDC has since removed it entirely.

We also trace "military-age male" back to what it actually is: a targeting category, not a demographic one. It enters American usage as a Vietnam body-count convention, is standardized during the Obama-era drone campaign - the New York Times reported in May 2012 that the method "in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants" - jumps to immigration in the 2015 Syrian refugee debate, and ends up in the signed text of Proclamation 10886 in January 2025.

One more thing worth sitting with: Cato's rebuttal is a reductio, not a denial. If the population really were 33 million, illegal immigrants would have an incarceration rate of 272 per 100,000 - nearly 80% below the native-born rate. The larger you make the number, the better it makes the group look on the very metrics it is deployed to indict.

What we do not know: the true unauthorized population is genuinely contested (DHS methodology yields roughly 11 million, Pew says 14 million, FAIR says 18.6 million - a 69% spread). The composition of the gotaway population is unmeasured, and it is plausible it skews more heavily male than the encounter population does; nobody has data on this, and it is the strongest empirical point available to the claim's defenders. We could not source where "40" came from at all.