Facing mounting outrage in the media over its new “zero-tolerance” policy at the border, the Trump administration is deliberately misleading Americans about the thousands of migrant children it has forcibly separated from their families. The objective, according to people close to Donald Trump, is twofold: “deterrence,” as Chief of Staff John Kelly explained last month, and political extortion. “The thinking in the building is to force people to the table,” a White House official told The Washington Post last week. A second official confirmed that the president is hoping to use the detained children as leverage to force Democrats to cut a deal on immigration: “If they aren’t going to cooperate, we are going to look to utilize the laws as hard as we can.”

The images emerging from these detention centers, where traumatized young children are kept in chain-link pens, have drawn comparisons to some of the worst episodes in American history, including the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII. Instead of ending the controversial policy, however, President Trump has promoted a contradictory and confusing message about family separation. At times, he has blamed Democrats for what he has described as their “law” (it is not a law); at others, he has suggested that family separation is indeed his policy, but that Democrats have forced him to take action by not agreeing to new immigration-reform legislation. In a series of tweets Monday morning, he wrote that it is “the Democrats fault for being weak and ineffective with Boarder [sic] Security and Crime” and called on Congress to “change the laws.” He also indicated that the policy is driven by racial or cultural concerns, describing migrant children as Trojan horses for “the worst criminals on earth” and declaring that the U.S. should not repeat Europe’s “big mistake” of “allowing millions of people in who have so strongly and violently changed their culture.”

Over the weekend and into Monday, a number of Trump officials made similar obfuscations about the policy. In every instance, however, the implication was clear: the problem could go away if Democrats will just play ball. “This is up to the Democrats. They could fix this right now. If you close those loopholes, we could do this humanely,” White House Deputy Press Secretary Hogan Gidley said during an interview with Fox & Friends on Monday, before accusing Democrats of bolstering drug cartels and the “child-smuggling industry.” Senior White House adviser Kellyanne Conway similarly put the onus on Congress to address the crisis at the border during an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday. After asserting that “nobody likes this policy,” Conway said, “If the Democrats are serious, and if a lot of Republicans are serious, they’ll come together. They won’t just talk about just this week, just the Dreamers, or just the wall, or just catch and release. It’s all of the above,” she said. Even First Lady Melania Trump appeared to lay responsibility for her husband’s policy at Congress’s feet, issuing a rare policy statement saying that she “hates to see children separated from their families,” but “hopes both sides of the aisle can finally come together.”

Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen, meanwhile, seems unsure whether her agency’s policy exists. “We do not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period,” she tweeted on Sunday, blaming Democrats, journalists, and advocacy groups of “irresponsible and unproductive” reporting on the border. On Monday, however, Nielsen appeared to reverse herself, defending the separation of migrant families as necessary when prosecuting migrants who cross the border illegally. “There are some who would like us to look the other way,” the Homeland Security secretary said at a speech before the National Sheriffs’ Association in New Orleans. “Past administrations may have done so, but we will not. We do not have the luxury of pretending that all individuals coming to this country as a family unit are, in fact, a family. We have to do our job. We will not apologize for doing our job.” Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who addressed the group after Nielsen, said while he doesn’t enjoy separating children from their parents, the situation could be fixed if only Democrats would accede to building Trump’s border wall and passing new laws to crack down on illegal immigration.

The mixed messaging has become a problem for Republicans seeking to defend the Trump policy, but unsure whether they are supposed to be blaming Democrats, defending “law and order,” or pretending the policy doesn’t exist. “The policy is incredibly complicated and it is one we need to do a better job of communicating,” White House Director of Legislative Affairs Marc Short told The Wall Street Journal. “We’ve not talked about the history of how we got to this point.”

The history of the policy, however, does not support the administration’s narrative. It is true that at the height of the 2014 migrant crisis, when there was a surge in unaccompanied minors crossing the border, the Obama administration placed a large number of families in detention centers. But these families—many of them fleeing violence in Central America—were allowed to remain together while their claims were being processed. Under Trump’s “zero-tolerance” policy, however, all adults caught crossing the border are criminally prosecuted, with no exceptions. As a result, thousands of children have been taken away from their parents and treated as if they had tried to cross the border alone. In some cases, undocumented adults are being deported without their children, who remain detained in federal immigration facilities with no way to contact their parents. Immigration experts worry that some families may be permanently separated.