During a news conference on Tuesday, Donald Trump was quick to point out who was actually to blame for the devastating image of a man and his 23-month-old daughter dead in the Rio Grande as they tried to cross the border from Mexico: Democrats, naturally.

“That’s like I’ve been saying—if they fixed the laws, you wouldn’t have that,” he said. He went on to discuss the issue at hand, which contrary to what you might think is not the tragic consequence of a racist border policy, but the choppy currents of the Rio Grande:

“It can be a very rough river of sorts. There are times when going across the Rio Grande is very, very dangerous depending on the time of year, and the conditions, and the rapidity of the water.”

He then explains that we have “many, many guards there,” but that if we had the right laws, “those people, they wouldn’t be coming up, they wouldn’t be trying.”

So according to Trump, the “many, many guards” aren’t a sufficient deterrent but…a wall would do it?

He also briefly departed from his usual fear-mongering of the violent criminals and rapists he insists are flooding the border to praise the probable character of the man, identified as Óscar Alberto Martínez, saying: “They have to change the laws. And then that father, who probably was this wonderful guy, with his daughter—things like that wouldn’t happen.”

In reality, Martínez and his family had traveled to Mexico from their native El Salvador, where they spent two months in a migrant camp awaiting an appointment to receive political asylum from the U.S. According to CNN, that particular port saw 2,000 migrants waiting at the end of May “in conditions of hunger and overcrowding,” while U.S. agents granted an average of three appointments per week.

It is precisely Trump’s policies that are prompting desperate migrants to take such drastic measures. And if the laws get “fixed” as he hopes, it’s bound to get even worse.

WATCH:

Trump comments on photo of dead child & father along banks of Rio Grande: "That's like I've been saying — if they fixed the laws you wouldn't have that."

He then pivots to talk about how "children are actually being brought into slavedom," which he blames on Democrats. pic.twitter.com/teOUy075bX

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 26, 2019