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Unlawful border crossings dominate the political debate about immigration. But estimates suggest 40 percent of undocumented people entered the United States with a visa.
Miriam Jordan is a national immigration correspondent.
June 2, 2025Updated 4:06 p.m. ET
The suspect in the Boulder, Colo., attack highlights a type of immigrant who has been largely absent from the heated political messaging on immigration: a person who arrives in the United States legally, on a tourist or other temporary visa, and remains after their permission to stay has lapsed.
Mohamed Sabry Soliman, an Egyptian national accused of carrying out the attack in Colorado, entered on a tourist visa in August 2022 that would have allowed him to remain in the country for six months once he presented his passport to a U.S. Customs and Border Protection official at an airport on arrival. Only later did he apply for asylum.
In the fiscal year 2023, the government estimated there were about 400,000 such overstays, according to an official report issued by the Department of Homeland Security. That year, about 2,400 Egyptians in the United States had overstayed their visas, or about 4 percent of all arrivals from that country, the report said.
But overall, the numbers are significant, even if President Trump and Republicans in Congress tend to talk up migrants who cross the southwestern border to enter the United States or present themselves to border agents and request asylum.
More than 40 percent of the undocumented immigrants in the country flew in with a visa, passed inspection at the airport and then stayed unlawfully, according to estimates by the Center for Migration Studies, a nonpartisan think tank.
“Scholars have long recognized that visa overstays constitute a significant share of the undocumented population,” said Stephen Yale-Loehr, an immigration scholar at Cornell Law School.
“This segment has not received nearly as much attention as people entering illegally across the U.S.-Mexico border because they are simply not as visible,” he said.
Identifying and tracking so-called visa overstays is extremely difficult, and they have not historically been a priority for enforcement.
Visas issued to a wide range of foreigners, from camp counselors to tourists and business travelers, can result in overstays. Students who enter the United States for a summer program should leave when that program ends, change to another immigration status, or pursue another program of study to maintain their lawful presence.
But in the past if they stayed beyond the time permitted, they would most likely not be detained unless they had committed a crime or were in police custody.
Miriam Jordan reports from a grass roots perspective on immigrants and their impact on the demographics, society and economy of the United States.
