SAN ANTONIO — The acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement said Tuesday the "border crisis" could be stopped with one simple change to immigration law, which he blamed Congress for not moving on.

ICE chief Ronald Vitiello was speaking to hundreds of federal law enforcement officers at a border security conference.

He urged lawmakers to pass a bill that ends the 20-day limit it can hold families for. The Department of Homeland Security could then ensure all immigrants who illegally enter the country and claim asylum could be held in federal custody pending resolution of their claim — instead of being released into the country.

"Specifically, we would like for the ability to have people have their hearing while they're in detention," Vitiello said in a speech at the Border Security Expo. "There's not enough time on the clock under the way Flores is operationalized."

A 2015 court ruling amended the decades-old Flores settlement so that families could no longer be held for an unlimited amount of time by ICE.

DHS has said immigrants from Central America are exploiting a "loophole" in the ruling by bringing their entire families or people they claim to be children with them to the border. Although illegal entry is a misdemeanor, families from countries that do not border the U.S. who claim asylum have a legal right to go through those proceedings and cannot be immediately deported like Mexican citizens.

Because of the 900,000-case backlog in immigration courts, a case can take one to two years to process. DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has stated that most people released from ICE custody do not show up to court for their hearings, and 80 percent of asylum seekers are denied asylum. Because they are not in ICE custody and their location within the U.S. is unknown, they are not deported.

Vitiello said without a long-term "fix" to Flores, the U.S. immigration system is bound to collapse as a result of the record-high levels of unaccompanied children and families arriving at the southwest border since October.

"There’s an absolutely unmitigated crisis going on at the southwest border," he said.

The crisis, according to Vitiello, was not the amount of illegal crossers being apprehended, or the high number of families, but how the latter is pulling border personnel from security tasks and even forcing Border Patrol to release families straight out of its custody because they know ICE does not physically have the space to hold someone for 20 days.

He blamed Congress for not giving DHS enough money to deal with the family situation in fiscal 2019.

"We've asked Congress to act ... It just hasn't been there," said Vitiello. "The funding levels for where we’re at are inadequate."