Nicole Russel is almost, but not quite, as smart as a box of hammers.
Generous-Title-Edition
Nicole Russell’s recent USA Today column credits Joe Biden’s termination of the “Remain in Mexico” policy with causing the 2023 immigration surge and credits Donald Trump’s 2025 reinstatement of that same policy with solving it. This narrative is tidy, but it collapses under scrutiny. The actual timeline is messier, the causation is less direct than she suggests, and the data she links to actually undermines her own argument.
Let me work through this with receipts.
**What Biden Actually Did**
The column states that Biden “removed several policies” including Remain in Mexico after taking office. This is technically accurate but imprecise in ways that matter. Biden suspended Migrant Protection Protocols on his first day in office in January 2021, fulfilling a campaign promise. However, a Trump-appointed federal judge subsequently forced the Biden administration to reinstate the policy from December 2021 through June 2022, meaning roughly 5,800 migrants were still subject to Remain in Mexico during that period. The policy wasn’t fully terminated until August 2022, after the Supreme Court ruled the administration had the legal authority to end it (DHS).
The Department of Homeland Security stated at the time that MPP “has endemic flaws, imposes unjustifiable human costs, and pulls resources and personnel away from other priority efforts to secure our border” (DHS). According to the American Immigration Council’s research on Migrant Protection Protocols, about 68,000 migrants were subjected to the program during its first iteration under Trump, and just 732 people placed into the program ever won asylum relief, a success rate of just over one percent. The American Immigration Council notes that “Citing widespread reports of severe human rights violations, high costs, an increase in repeat border crossings, and serious logistical problems caused by the program, the Biden administration suspended, and then terminated, MPP after taking office” (American Immigration Council).
The PBS NewsHour reported on August 8, 2022, that the Biden administration ended the Trump-era policy requiring asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico for hearings in U.S. immigration court, hours after a judge lifted an injunction that had been in effect since December. The timing had been in doubt since the Supreme Court ruled on June 30, 2022, that the Biden administration could end the Remain in Mexico policy. DHS officials had been largely silent, saying they had to wait for the court to certify the ruling and for the Trump-appointed judge to lift his injunction (PBS).
**The Timeline Problem**
The column implies direct causation: Biden ended Remain in Mexico, therefore illegal immigration surged. The problem with this argument is that Remain in Mexico ended in August 2022, but the record encounter numbers she references didn’t occur until December 2023, more than a year later. If the policy was the primary driver of reduced crossings, you would expect crossings to spike immediately upon its termination. Instead, border encounters remained relatively stable through most of 2022 and into 2023, with the dramatic increase coming later.
The more proximate cause of the late-2023 surge was the end of Title 42 in May 2023. Title 42 was a pandemic-era policy that allowed immediate expulsion of migrants on public health grounds, and its termination removed a significant enforcement mechanism that had been in place since March 2020. CBP’s enforcement statistics explain that encounter data includes both Title 8 apprehensions and Title 42 expulsions, and the transition from Title 42 to standard Title 8 processing created a significant shift in how migrants were handled at the border (CBP Enforcement Statistics).
**The Data Russell Herself Cites Undermines Her Argument**
This is where the column becomes genuinely dishonest. Russell links to Pew Research data showing that migrant encounters “have fallen sharply in 2024.” What she neglects to mention is that this decline began under Biden, not Trump. According to the Pew Research analysis published October 1, 2024, Border Patrol encounters plummeted 77% from 249,741 in December 2023 to 58,038 by August 2024. Trump didn’t take office until January 2025. The decline was already underway.
Pew Research explicitly notes that the decline “has come amid policy changes on both sides of the border” including Biden’s June 2024 executive order making it much more difficult for migrants who enter without legal permission to seek asylum, and “authorities in Mexico have stepped up enforcement to prevent migrants from reaching the U.S. border.” Both of these factors occurred before Trump took office (Pew Research).
**The CBP Data Doesn’t Say What She Thinks It Says**
Russell cites CBP data claiming that releases of illegal migrants were at zero for seven consecutive months as of December 2024. Regardless of whether this specific claim is accurate, it ignores the broader trend: the border crossing numbers were already declining significantly before Trump’s inauguration.
You can verify the encounter data yourself through CBP’s public data portal. The portal provides downloadable datasets and dashboards tracking nationwide encounters and southwest land border encounters. Both pages are updated regularly and anyone can pull the historical encounter numbers to see that the decline was already documented in government data for months prior to Trump’s inauguration (CBP Data Portal; CBP Southwest Border).
This is the rhetorical equivalent of taking credit for the sun rising after someone else pointed out it was getting light outside.
**The Larger Analytical Failure**
Immigration patterns are driven by a complex set of factors including conditions in source countries, enforcement on both sides of the border, seasonal patterns, economic conditions, and the availability or elimination of legal pathways. Reducing this to a simple “Biden ended Remain in Mexico, therefore surge; Trump reinstated it, therefore decline” ignores almost all of those variables.
The American Immigration Council notes that “The impact of Remain in Mexico on deterrence of migrants was unclear. Although DHS has argued that the program led to a reduction in the overall number of migrants crossing the border, the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute has observed that ‘While Remain in Mexico may have contributed to a perception that it would be harder to cross the border, it is not clear that the program was an effective deterrent on its own.’” Data from the program’s operation suggests that one in three migrants placed into the program made subsequent attempts to cross the border, and the program’s own asylum success rate was barely above 1% (American Immigration Council).
**What This Looks Like**
Russell’s column is a masterclass in partisan narrative construction. She starts with a factual premise that Biden did end Remain in Mexico, builds a causal argument that ignores contradictory evidence and timeline inconsistencies, and then credits a political figure with solving a problem that was already trending toward resolution before he took office.
It’s not a lie in the strictest sense. It’s something more insidious: a selective presentation of facts arranged to tell a story that the evidence doesn’t actually support. The data she provides, properly understood, undermines the very argument she’s making. The encounter numbers from CBP, the Pew Research analysis, the DHS statements, and the American Immigration Council research all paint a more complicated picture than her column acknowledges.
All of these sources are publicly accessible. Anyone willing to spend twenty minutes clicking through these links can verify this for themselves.
You can read Nicole’s nonsense if you want to: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2025/12/30/trump-2025-year-review-leadership-we-needed/87944604007/
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**Works Cited**
American Immigration Council. “The Migrant Protection Protocols: An Explanation of the Remain in Mexico Program.” American Immigration Council, 1 Feb. 2024, www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/migrant-protection-protocols.
CBP. “Nationwide Encounters and Title 8 and Title 42 Statistics.” U.S. Customs and Border Protection, www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/cbp-enforcement-statistics/title-8-and-title-42-statistics.
CBP. “Southwest Land Border Encounters.” U.S. Customs and Border Protection, www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/southwest-land-border-encounters.
CBP. “CBP Public Data Portal.” U.S. Customs and Border Protection, www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/cbp-public-data-portal.
DHS. “DHS Statement on U.S. District Court’s Decision Regarding MPP.” Department of Homeland Security, 8 Aug. 2022, www.dhs.gov/news/2022/08/08/dhs-statement-us-district-courts-decision-regarding-mpp.
PBS NewsHour. “Biden Administration Ends Trump-era Remain in Mexico Policy.” PBS NewsHour, 8 Aug. 2022, www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/biden-administration-ends-trump-era-remain-in-mexico-policy.
Pew Research Center. “Migrant Encounters at U.S.-Mexico Border Have Fallen Sharply in 2024.” Pew Research Center, 1 Oct. 2024, www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/10/01/migrant-encounters-at-u-s-mexico-border-have-fallen-sharply-in-2024/.