One side effect of the policy, as the Department of Homeland Security acknowledged at the time, was that more children would be separated from their parents. Under a 1997 legal agreement, children can’t be held in jail, so if their parents are locked up, the children have to go somewhere else. They’re declared unaccompanied minors, then entrusted to the Department of Health and Human Services, which places them with parents if possible, relatives failing that, or other custodial programs if neither parents nor relatives are available.

NBC reported Tuesday that hundreds of children have been held past the legal deadline in facilities that are not equipped for them. News reports have said that the administration “lost” nearly 1,500 who were released, though as The Washington Post explains, that’s a little misleading. It’s more accurate to say HHS lost contact with those children and no longer has custody, not that no one has custody of them. Trump was also happy to point out that photos that showed children in cages at the border were actually from the Obama administration.

Yet in other ways, Trump has tried to soft-pedal the effects of the policy Sessions announced in May, and to distance himself from it. On May 26, he tweeted, “Put pressure on the Democrats to end the horrible law that separates children from there [sic] parents once they cross the Border into the U.S.” On Tuesday, he added:

Separating families at the Border is the fault of bad legislation passed by the Democrats. Border Security laws should be changed but the Dems can’t get their act together! Started the Wall. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 5, 2018

These tweets are misleading. There is no law that requires separation per se; the Flores agreement simply says children can’t be incarcerated, and the Trump administration has made a decision to send all parents apprehended to jail, necessitating separation.

One could make an argument for such a separation—for example, one could say that it serves as a deterrent, discouraging parents from bringing their children if they don’t want to be separated. The retiring head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, however, says deterrence is not the goal of the policy. Sessions has presented this as simply an unfortunate byproduct of enforcing the law. “If you don’t want your child separated, then don’t bring them across the border illegally,” he said.

Trump has not mounted any such defense, though. Instead, he has attacked the policy as the fault of his political opponents. He refers to “bad legislation passed by Democrats,” but although the Flores agreement came into effect in 1997, during the presidency of Democrat Bill Clinton, it’s not a law. Another law, the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, was signed by President George W. Bush and exempts unaccompanied children from speedy deportation to their home country.