The Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration has brought population growth in New York City to a screeching halt.

The city’s population in July 2025 was 8.58 million, according to estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau released Thursday, down about 12,200 from July 2024 and significantly less than the 8.8 million New Yorkers counted in April 2020.

International arrivals in the 12 months before July 2025 plunged to only 66,000, the lowest number since the pandemic and far less than the 220,000 immigrants who arrived over that same period in 2023-24.

About 114,000 left the city for other locations in the United States in the year ending last July, about the same pace that has existed since the pandemic. For decades, international migration has more than offset the number of New Yorkers leaving for elsewhere in the country.

“Today, New York has a big and robust economy, so a single year of downturn is not going to knock it off its balance,” said David Kallick, an economist specializing in immigration issues at the Immigration Research Institute. 

“But if we see a sustained drop in the number of people coming in — and that’s very much a story of immigration — then the city will shrink. New York saw in the 1970s how dire the results of population decline can be.” 

The numbers released Thursday are estimates derived from examining births, deaths and migration data. The Census also revised its estimates for previous years, which put the July 2020 population at 8.75 million, followed by a decline of about 400,000 during the pandemic and a rebound of about 220,000 since 2022.

The city continued to have a natural increase in population as births outpace deaths. Some upstate counties with older populations see deaths outpace births, meaning a decline in immigration contributes to an even steeper population decline, said Jan Vink of the program on applied demographics at Cornell University.

The Census Bureau did not include any estimates of those deported under Trump policies or those who left for other countries voluntarily. Data released by ICE and analyzed by THE CITY puts the number of deportations in the first six months of the year at fewer than 2,000.

Kallick notes that the period covers only the first six months of the Trump administration, when its crackdown on immigration was just ramping up.

Other cities also dependent on immigration like Los Angeles, Miami and San Diego saw more significant declines in population.

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