Immigration encounters, August 2026

The latest published month

34,428

Encounters, August 2026

Events recorded, not people. One person may be encountered more than once.

+1.9%

Change on the prior month

From 33,788 the month before.

+31.6%

Change on the same month a year earlier

From 26,162 a year earlier.

41

Sectors and field offices reporting

Border Patrol sectors and Office of Field Operations field offices.

Every one of August 2026’s encounters was recorded under Title 8, the general immigration authority. Title 42, the public-health expulsion authority, has recorded none since May 2023; the two are kept apart in the data and are never added together.

August 2026 is the most recent month CBP has published. CBP republishes the file each month and revises earlier months in it; these figures were taken on September 19, 2026.

What stands out

Six findings. From the 47 months CBP has published, each one assembled from values a query returned.

• August 2026's 34,428 encounters are 9.3% of December 2023's 370,883, the highest month in the record. The scale of the record →

  The lowest is July 2025, at 24,589. Every month since has been above it, so the latest figure is not the floor of the series.

• Border Patrol, which works between the ports of entry, accounted for 74.3% of encounters in October 2022 and 31.8% in August 2026. Most encounters are now recorded at a port of entry by the Office of Field Operations. Where encounters happen →

  Counts, not shares, are what moved: Border Patrol recorded 206,902 in the first month of the record and 10,939 in the latest, while Field Operations went from 71,415 to 23,489. Both fell; Border Patrol fell further.

• The Southwest land border was 83.2% of all encounters in October 2022 and 35.6% in August 2026. The southwest border →

  CBP's third region is "Other" — the interior and coastal field offices, which are neither land border. It recorded 16,099 in August 2026, so a figure described as a border total is not one.

• Encounters are down 47.6% on the year — 348,866 across 11 months against 665,904 in the same 11 months of 2025 — and up 31.6% on the month a year earlier. Fiscal 2026 so far →

  The two point opposite ways: the fall happened earlier in the year. Comparing the part-year against the whole of 2025 instead would report a larger fall and would be comparing 11 months with twelve.

• Buffalo Field Office recorded the most encounters of any of CBP's 41 areas of responsibility in August 2026, 2,714. It is on the northern land border. Buffalo Field Office →

  Over the whole record the busiest is Tucson Sector, with 894,614 against Buffalo Field Office's 198,449. The rank in one month is not the rank over four years.

• Single adults are 84.7% of August 2026's encounters, 29,162 of 34,428. Who is encountered →

  Minors, accompanied and unaccompanied together, are 3.4% — 1,185. These are encounters, not people: one person encountered twice is two rows, and CBP does not publish a person count.

Fiscal year 2026 so far

The first 11 months of fiscal year 2026 carry 348,866 encounters. The same first 11 months of fiscal year 2025 carried 665,904, a change of -47.6%.

Fiscal year 2026 began on October 1, 2025, and is still running. It is compared here only with the same number of months of the year before, never with a completed year: eleven months against twelve would show a fall that is only a shorter period.

Since October 2022

Who was encountered

These four categories are CBP’s own, and every encounter falls in exactly one, so they sum to the nationwide figure. “Family unit individuals” counts each member of a family unit, not each family.

Which part of CBP recorded them

CBP also publishes each encounter under one of three types. In August 2026 there were 10,939 apprehensions, 23,489 inadmissibles, and 0 expulsions. The component split and the type split are two separate breakdowns of the same total; neither determines the other.

By region

• Southwest Land Border

  12,242

  encounters in August 2026

• Northern Land Border

  6,087

  encounters in August 2026

• Other

  16,099

  encounters in August 2026

These are CBP’s own groupings. There is no coastal region in this file: everything not recorded on the northern or southwest land border, including maritime and interior field offices, is grouped by CBP as Other, and we publish that grouping rather than inventing a name for it.

CBP names a fixed set of countries and groups every other nationality as Other. That row is kept here, because leaving it out would make the named countries look like the whole, and it has no page of its own, because it is not a country.

Analysis

Each brief is prose written around values a query returned. Every figure in one is re-checked against its query before it can merge, so a number in the text cannot drift from the data behind it.

• The composition inverted while the total fell

  Customs and Border Protection publishes its nationwide encounters split two ways that are easy to confuse. One is the legal authority an encounter was processed under. The other is which part of the agency recorded it: the Office of Field Operations, which works the ports of entry, or the Border Patrol, which works the ground between them.

  American Factbook Research · September 21, 2026

• What an encounter is, and what it is not

  Every figure the immigration hub publishes rests on one word, and the word does not mean what most readers take it to mean. This is what CBP counts when it counts an encounter, in the publisher's own categories, across the 7,143,058 encounters in the series this site holds.

  American Factbook Research · September 21, 2026