Undocumented immigrants are not proof of a scheme to replace whites with nonwhites

Far-right activist Charlie Kirk claimed that undocumented immigrants coming to the U.S. is proof of an organized effort to "replace" white Americans.  

"The ‘Great Replacement’ is not a theory, it’s a reality," Kirk wrote in a Feb. 24 Instagram post alongside a screenshot of a Fox News story with the headline: "7.2M illegals entered the U.S. under Biden admin(istration), an amount greater than population of 36 states."

The Instagram post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)

We emailed Kirk at his Turning Point USA organization about the claim but received no response.

The "great replacement theory" is a debunked conspiracy theory that warns of an elaborate conspiracy by Democratic and U.S. elites to systematically replace white Americans with nonwhite people to change U.S. political systems. It traces back to 20th century French nationalism but has become a frequent talking point for former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. The theory also has been cited by several perpetrators of violent attacks of the last several years, including the shooter who killed 10 people at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket in 2022. 

The theory ignores the many documented root causes people seek to immigrate to the U.S. through the southern border, including war, scarcity of food and medicine, a legacy of corporate colonialism and other social ills.

This post’s claim distorts reported immigration figures.

The number in Fox’s story — 7.2 million — represents the number of encounters U.S. border officials had with immigrants at the Southwest border from October 2021 through September 2024.

But that figure doesn’t show how many migrants entered and remained in the country. U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s encounter data tracks events, not people, and the same person can be recorded multiple times for repeated tries at crossing the border.

Millions of encounters led to removals.

There have been more than 3.6 million removals, returns and expulsions from February 2021, Biden’s first month in office, to September 2023, Department of Homeland Security estimates show.

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This data also represents events, not people. So, the same person can be expelled multiple times and each time would count as a separate expulsion.

About 2.3 million people have been released into the U.S. under Biden’s administration, Department of Homeland Security data shows. Most of them are families, according to The Washington Post. About 356,000 children who crossed the border alone were also let in.

That data alone is not proof of a vast plan to systematically bring in undocumented immigrants to replace white citizens in the U.S., a nation of about 334 million people. 

We rate this claim False. 

PolitiFact Reporter Maria Ramirez Uribe contributed to this report.