The White House on Monday defiantly refused to abandon its policy of separating children from their asylum-seeking parents who crossed the border illegally despite a raging firestorm of bipartisan criticism.

“I want to provide you an update on the illegal crisis on the southern border and the efforts the administration is taking to solve this crisis, and to stop the flood of illegal immigrants an drugs contraband and crime coming across the border,” Department of Homeland Security chief Kirstjen Nielsen said during the White House press briefing.

“In the last three months we’ve seen illegal immigration on our southern border exceed 50,000 people each month, multiples over each month last year. Since this time last year, there has been a 325 percent increase in unaccompanied alien children and a 435 percent increase in family units entering the country illegally.”

A White House official told CNN that spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders did not want to conduct the briefing alone, and Nielsen was recruited to join her.

As President Trump did earlier in the day, Nielsen blamed congressional Democrats for what she said was a failure to close loopholes in the country’s immigration laws.

And she said that if DHS didn’t do its job and enforce the law, it would mark “the beginning of the unraveling of the democracy when the body who makes the laws instead of changing them tells the enforcement body not to enforce the law.”

She did not respond when asked whether the policy was cruel.

And she blamed the children’s parents for sending them across the border with others or for bringing them into the country themselves.