The Biggest Lie in Washington

The green-card factories my father built prove insiders have known the real head count for decades

Counting Cards, Not People: The 50-Million Illegals Scandal

Thursday, June 12th, 2025: By Walter Curt

Everyone has heard Washington’s lullaby: “there are only 11 million illegals in America.” It’s been the go-to talking point since dial-up internet—but it was never true, and anyone working inside the system has known it. My own family had an inside seat. For fifteen years my father helped build and run the machinery that manufactures every U.S. green card and work-authorization document. From that vantage point, the data tell a very different story: the real number is closer to 50 million—and the federal government has been sitting on that uncomfortable fact for two decades.

Back in the early 2000s, senior Immigration and Naturalization Service officials convened my father’s team—the very people who had just finished wiring, staffing and running the Kentucky card-printing facility and the four regional service centers. The Bush White House was pushing a plan to hand secure, fraud-proof work permits to the illegal population. First question on the table: how many cards do we have to print? Nobody at INS could answer. After an afternoon of internal estimates—and no political spin—the career staff settled on a working figure of 23 to 28 million illegal immigrants already inside the country. Those numbers weren’t compiled for public release; they were raw logistics, the starting point for calculating whether an entirely new card-printing complex would be needed.

The answer, incidentally, was yes. Doubling the existing infrastructure would require four new service centers, another dedicated high-security print plant, and at least a decade of procurement, construction, hiring and testing. Cost aside, the timeline alone killed the idea. But the head-count it revealed never saw daylight. Official Washington shrugged and told the people “11 million.”

Fast-forward. If we accept the 23–28 million baseline in 2003 and tack on a conservative flow of roughly one million illegal entrants per year—a figure that matches the annual volume of legal green cards my father’s shop produced—simple math lands us north of 40 million by the time Joe Biden took the oath. The last four fiscal years put the surge into overdrive. Customs and Border Protection logged 1.96 million encounters in FY 2021, 2.77 million in FY 2022, 3.20 million in FY 2023, and 2.90 million in FY 2024—more than 10 million encounters with only a fraction ever removed. ICE data confirm deportations barely scratched nine percent of last year’s total encounters.

Those are just the ones we ran into. Border Patrol agents and DHS officials privately admit that for every migrant stopped, at least one “got-away” slips through. Add that to the ledger and it becomes obvious how the country plausibly absorbs another 10 million illegal residents in a single presidential term.

Still think 50 million sounds wild? Consider that establishment estimates have been creeping up in spite of themselves. A Yale-MIT study put the 2018 tally as high as 22 million—double the official line. The Federation for American Immigration Reform now pegs the population at 18.6 million after discounting 2024’s flood. Yet DHS and Pew Research continue to recycle the 11 million figure, merely shifting the date on the press release. In plain English: the bureaucracy’s own numbers contradict its public rhetoric, and the press dutifully prints the rhetoric.

Why the charade? Because admitting the truth would expose a bipartisan failure that spans five administrations, blow up every budget, and reset congressional apportionment in a dozen states. Fifty million is larger than California; it is twenty percent of the entire U.S. labor force. It depresses wages for working-class citizens, swamps hospital ERs, strains public schools, and dilutes the political representation of every American whose district is padded by non-citizens. The stakes could not be higher, which is why the permanent class prefers the comfort of a bogus, unchanging “11 million.”

My father knows the hard numbers because he built the factories that printed them—17 million green cards over fifteen years, three shifts a day, every batch logged and audited. When INS brass tossed out that 23–28 million estimate, they were simply calculating how many additional secure work permits they would need—roughly one-third of the total illegal population they privately acknowledged. If the agency could see that iceberg in the early 2000s, the official narrative never made sense. Obama’s DHS sanitized the data, Biden’s team buried it altogether, and the result is a border crisis so vast even legacy outlets can’t pretend it isn’t happening. The lie metastasized, the numbers ballooned, and now the bill has come due.

Congress doesn’t need another blue-ribbon commission; it needs an honest audit that starts with the card-printing ledgers themselves. Cross-check them against Social Security “no-match” files, school enrollments, hospital uncompensated-care ledgers, and the mountain of biometric data DHS already collects but refuses to reconcile. Then level with the American people. We can debate amnesty, attrition, mass deportation—whatever remedy the voters prefer—but first Washington must stop gas-lighting the public.