After weeks of evasions and outright lies aimed at avoiding responsibility for the torture he has inflicted upon immigrant families, President Donald Trump finally admitted in an off-the-rails speech on Tuesday that the thousands of family separations that have taken place on his watch are a direct consequence of his administration's decision to prosecute parents who cross the U.S.-Mexico border illegally.

"When you prosecute the parents for coming in illegally—which should happen—you have to take the children away," Trump said before the National Federation of Independent Business. "Now you don't have to prosecute them, but then you're not prosecuting them for coming in illegally. That's not good."

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Trump: "When you are prosecute the parents for coming in illegally — which should happen — you have to take the children away." pic.twitter.com/uv5oF2eeJd — Meg Wagner (@megwagner) June 19, 2018

As Brianna Rennix of Current Affairs has noted, family separations are hardly an unintended result of the Trump administration's so-called "zero-tolerance" policy, as the president suggested when he claimed in his speech that he doesn't "want children taken away from parents."

"The Trump administration's decision to prosecute parents for illegal entry was taken in order to create an excuse to separate mothers from children" so they could keep the mothers detained, Rennix observed on Sunday in a detailed analysis of the White House's immigration policies.

In addition to conceding that his administration's policy shift is responsible for the thousands of family separations that have taken place over the past six weeks alone, Trump also threatened to cut off "funding" for Central American nations that "send" migrants to the United States and slammed the press for daring to publish photos and videos of children detained in cages.

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"They are helping these smugglers and these traffickers like nobody would believe," Trump said of the media, which has circulated photos released by his own government.

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Trump claims the press is assisting criminal immigrants: "They are helping these smugglers and these traffickers like nobody would believe" pic.twitter.com/BkVhJc1N1V — Meg Wagner (@megwagner) June 19, 2018

As a finale to his defense of cruelly separating children from their parents, Trump danced to one side of the stage and literally hugged an American flag: