By other accounts, however, Trump’s grasping is less far-fetched. Adam Cox, a law professor at New York University, told the Times that the Court has never clearly resolved the dispute over whether people apprehended at the border, who are not U.S. citizens, have due-process protections—an argument he says Department of Justice officials in both Republican and Democratic administrations have made. Cox told the Times that since Trump’s election, his administration has been seeking to expand a 1996 statute allowing the rapid deportation of undocumented immigrants and immigrants with fraudulent papers. “One of the things that is being considered is an expanded expedited removal to the full statutory limit,” he said, adding that “it is already true that a lot of people show up at the border get removed with no access to immigration courts or the judicial process.”

Even as the president dithered, the rest of his administration struggled to untangle the policy he had introduced. The departments of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services are scrambling to reunite children who have been separated from their parents, more than 2,000 of whom are reportedly scattered around the United States. On Capitol Hill, another group of Republican lawmakers is reportedly drafting a bill to address the glaring flaw in Trump’s executive order halting family separations: it contradicts the 1997 Flores settlement and a subsequent Obama-era court ruling, both of which prohibit families with children being detained for more than 20 days. Without the new bill’s passage, Trump’s new order could have a dauntingly short shelf life. “The problem with his executive order is, it’s in direct contradiction to the standing order and ruling from the judge in 2015,” Tom Bossert, Trump’s former Homeland Security adviser, said during an interview with ABC’s This Week on Sunday. “My guess, that stroke of a pen does not survive three weeks before this court overrules it.”

Yet Trump, whether accidentally or on purpose, seems dead set on hindering any solution he cannot control. After failing to pass a hard-line immigration bill last week, the House is expected to vote on a broader overhaul this week that would include $25 billion for a wall along the southern U.S. border, curtail legal immigration, and provide a path to citizenship for so-called “Dreamers.” But the odds of the bill’s passage look slim, with Democrats unified against the measure and Republicans divided over what U.S. immigration laws should look like. Despite the White House signaling that it will support any immigration legislation that survives the House, the president has sent a series of mixed signals to the G.O.P.: “I don’t understand where the administration is right now on this issue,” Rep. Mike Coffman said Friday, just after Trump tweeted that lawmakers should “stop wasting their time” on immigration until after midterms. Without a clear mandate, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said the upper chamber is unlikely to take up the measure.

The president is likewise opposed to measures that would increase the number of immigration judges to expedite the processing of immigrant families, as both Texas’s Ted Cruz last week and Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, who serves as chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, have suggested. “Hiring many thousands of judges, and going through a long and complicated legal process, is not the way to go—will always be disfunctional [sic],” he wrote on Twitter Monday morning, arguing that the “only real answer” to the self-imposed crisis is to build his long-sought border wall.