Only half of all inadmissible decisions occurred at ports in the four OFO Field Offices at the US-Mexico border—El Paso, Laredo, San Diego, and Tucson. TRAC’s new report takes a detailed look at these inadmissibility decisions at all ports across the country. How have numbers changed over time, which ports have the highest volume, and what are the ultimate decisions port personnel make on whether these individuals are turned away or allowed to enter the U.S.

Over the last decade, the total number of inadmissibility dispositions hovered in the low 200,000s until fiscal years 2020 and 2021. Then entries at ports dropped following Covid-19 restrictions. During the Biden administration (FY 2021-2024), totals in most categories began climbing. However, expedited removals as well as credible fear referrals were lower under Biden than during the Trump years.

In FY 2024, the largest group (45 percent) of inadmissible decisions involved "Notice to Appear" forms, in which noncitizens (often asylum seekers) received orders to attend a future hearing at Immigration Court to contest the government’s request to be allowed to deport them. The next largest category (35 percent) were individuals given humanitarian parole allowing temporary physical entry. Just one out of a hundred (1 percent) were given credible fear screening by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) officers, while 18 percent were turned away and not allowed to enter the U.S.

Depending on the location of the port of entry, OFO officials encounter people with different circumstances behind their request for admission.

• Out of the total of 550,000 Notice-to-Appear documents issued by OFO offices in FY 2024—the first step of a removal process based on a court proceeding—over 99 percent were issued at ports of entry at the U.S.-Mexico border.
• Most humanitarian parole decisions were made at locations that are not at the U.S.-Mexico border. More than half of all parole determinations were issued in Miami’s Field Office (248,000).
• Almost all OFO records that documented a credible fear asylum claim (about 1 percent of all inadmissible dispositions) occurred at locations at ports of entry on the U.S. Mexico border. A little less than half of all credible fear hearings originated from the OFO San Diego office.
• Withdrawals were most common at northern ports of entry, including those located in Buffalo, Seattle, and Boston offices.
• Expedited Removals—the removal of a person from the U.S. without any court hearing—were more widely distributed across various offices than other dispositions. The four US-Mexico border offices documented as many expedited removals as the rest of the country.

These findings are based on an analysis of recently received case-by-case internal port authority records obtained following a persistent campaign by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

To dig further into all the details, by nationality, time period, field office, and for some years the specific port, use TRAC’s online Stopping "Inadmissibles" at U.S. Ports of Entry tool found here.