A border encounter is an event, not a person

The facts

1. 01CBP's nationwide encounter figures combine U.S. Border Patrol apprehensions between ports of entry, Office of Field Operations inadmissibility determinations at ports of entry, and — through May 2023 — Title 42 expulsions.
2. 02The same person can be encountered more than once, so the number of encounters is larger than the number of unique individuals. CBP has published a separate Border Patrol recidivism rate for some years, not a unique-person count for every period.
3. 03An encounter is not a removal, a detention, or a grant of admission. Those are separate measures kept by separate agencies, and they cannot be read off the encounter total.
4. 04CBP publishes encounters by month and by fiscal year. The federal fiscal year runs from October 1 to September 30, so the current year's total is incomplete until then.
5. 05ImmigrationClock sums CBP's own published file by fiscal year, labels the current year as year-to-date, and never presents a partial year beside a full one as though they covered the same span.