Seven Million Gone? Fact-checking Michael Knowles on a 2.3-million drop that tripled

Verdict: false (truth score 0.10). On The Michael Knowles Show Ep. 2061 (16 Sep 2026), Michael Knowles said the U.S. illegal-immigrant population fell by a net 7 million in the second Trump administration's first year and a half.

He has the direction right, because the population is shrinking. He has the size wrong: the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors low immigration, puts the drop at 2.3 million. Knowles cited that same CIS figure accurately nine days earlier, in Ep. 2055.

We start with the strongest version of Knowles's point. Net migration turned negative in 2025 for the first time in decades. On CIS's numbers, the unauthorized population is falling faster than in any period on record. If he had said "more than 2 million," the claim would have been defensible. The problem is the size of the number, which is roughly three times too big.

CIS used Census Current Population Survey data. It counts 15.8 million illegal immigrants in January 2025 and 13.5 million in July 2026, a net decline of 2.3 million. The total foreign-born population, legal and illegal together, fell about 2.9 million over the same period. A net illegal decline of 7 million would only work if the legal immigrant population had grown by about 4 million at the same time, and nothing shows that happened. Working backward, 7 million out with 13.5 million left means a starting stock of 20.5 million, and no estimator puts it there. Other estimates are lower still: the Dallas Fed's projections give roughly 1.1 to 1.5 million through mid-2026, and CBO projects declines of about 360,000 in 2025 and 330,000 in 2026.

The largest official number is DHS's "more than 3 million departures." That figure counts gross outflows, not net change. About 2.2 million of it is estimated self-deportations, and DHS has never published how it calculates them. Even taken at face value, it is less than half of 7 million.

We also look at why the line worked on air. It was framed as a disappointment ("they wanted it to be 8 or 9 million"), and it sat inside an inflated "25 million came in" baseline. We cover how the same DHS count gets relabeled across shows as deportations, as returns, and as net change. We also cover what we still don't know: where the 7 million came from. One unconfirmed lead is that it is an earlier Biden-era inflow figure with its direction reversed.