No, actually, he didn't. The number of illegal crossing per year went up under Trump.
The Remain in Mexico policy only worked because Mexico went along with it, which they clearly are not now. (And frankly, who can blame them). It was roundly condemned by human rights groups, and the only reason it "kind of" worked in 2020 is that because of Covid, Migrants were reluctant to enter the US.
Fatally Flawed - Human Rights First
“Remain in Mexico” Policy Should Never Be Revived On August 8, 2022, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced the end of the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” (RMX) policy. The announcement came after a federal district court, following a Supreme Court ruling in June 2022, lifted an...
humanrightsfirst.org
But the RMX policy—and others like it that would force asylum seekers to wait outside the United States for their cases to be heard—simply cannot be implemented lawfully, safely, fairly, or humanely. During the court-ordered reimplementation of RMX (or RMX 2.0), asylum seekers reported horrific kidnappings, rapes, and other violent attacks after DHS returned them to Mexico. RMX hearings also remained a due process farce. Only a tiny percentage of the individuals whose cases were decided under RMX 2.0 managed to find attorneys to represent them. A vanishingly small number of the mainly Cubans, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans subjected to the policy were granted asylum—just 63 people out of more than 1,600 completed cases.
The Biden administration rightly honored its election pledge to end this fatally flawed policy and correctly terminated the policy after the initial legal challenge. Congress created the asylum system within the borders of the United States specifically to adjudicate the cases of asylum seekers arriving at or after crossing the border. RMX violates U.S. law and international treaty obligations, denies refugee protections to people fleeing persecution and torture, and results in widespread human rights violations against people returned to Mexico. In August 2022, the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination called on the United States to “redouble efforts to swiftly end” RMX, noting its “disparate impact . . . on migrants of African descent and of Hispanic/Latino origin.” As DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas concluded, RMX “has endemic flaws,” “imposes unjustifiable human costs,” and has “inherent problems . . . that no amount of resources can sufficiently fix.” RMX should never be resurrected by a future administration, adopted in law by Congress, or again forced by the courts into use.
