Twenty-Five Million to Zero: How a Release Statistic Became a Border That Doesn't Exist
Checks The Dan Bongino Show
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Claim: illegal immigration went from 25 million entries under Biden to zero under Trump. Our verdict is false (truth score 0.10, confidence 0.85), because both numbers are wrong.
The show we checked: The Dan Bongino Show, "Bongino Weekend Report – Week of 09/14/26" (published 19 September 2026), at 37:29.
The strongest case for the claim comes first. The drop in border crossings is real, historically large and fast. Bongino did not invent the phrase "zero illegal aliens admitted." It is almost word for word what President Trump said in his 2026 State of the Union. If you read it narrowly as "zero people released after being caught," it accurately describes DHS's zero-releases policy. DHS announced 16 straight months of that policy on 16 September 2026, three days before the episode.
The claim breaks where the sentence sets "admitted" against "entering" and the host concludes, "It's at zero. Problem solved." A figure about what happens to people in custody becomes a figure about the whole border. The same DHS release that announces the streak reports 8,870 southwest-border apprehensions in August 2026. CBP's own monthly releases show roughly 25,000 to 35,000 nationwide encounters a month through 2025 and 2026. Those are record lows. They are not zero.
The 25 million figure has no support in any data source. Recorded encounters under Biden were about 10 to 11 million, and that count includes repeat crossers and millions of people who were expelled. Even the Republican-led House Homeland Security Committee used that figure. The entire unauthorized population is estimated at 11 to 13 million. The number goes back to the 2024 campaign, and fact-checkers rejected it then.
We also trace how the "zero" grew across our archive in nine weeks, from "no one released into the interior" to "no one has entered illegally in 17 months." We ask why a number you can feel is so hard to rebut on audio. And we list what we still cannot know: undetected crossings, people moving to other routes, and exactly which categories "zero releases" leaves out.