As Republicans and Democrats trade blame on who bears responsibility for the worsening border crisis, the Biden administration has pledged to pursue several solutions that critics argue will only worsen the problem.

More than a dozen Republican senators on Friday returned from a trip to the border led by Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, armed with images and descriptions of horrific conditions in facilities housing unaccompanied minors in Texas. The GOP lawmakers said some of the front-line Border Patrol agents with whom they spoke blamed President Joe Biden directly for inspiring a massive influx of migrants since taking office.

But the White House has continued to point the finger at former President Donald Trump as scrutiny of the crisis mounts. White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Monday that the Biden administration is still “digging out of a broken system over the past four years,” and Biden himself argued repeatedly at a press conference on Thursday that Trump created the situation he and his White House have refused to label as a crisis.

Why Democrats blame Trump

The president accused Trump of “dismantling” the Department of Health and Human Services facilities where unaccompanied minors in the custody of Border Patrol must by law be transferred within 72 hours. Due to the overwhelming number of minors crossing the border, some children are remaining in crowded Customs and Border Protection facilities far longer than they should.

Psaki on Monday cited a hiring freeze at the Office of Refugee Resettlement under Trump as a key reason why thousands of unaccompanied minors are languishing in crowded conditions at the border. She suggested the freeze at the office, which is housed within HHS, has hampered the agency’s ability to find placement for the much larger number of unaccompanied minors transferring into HHS custody.

And the White House has repeatedly claimed the Trump administration’s cuts to foreign aid in Central American countries allowed the “root causes” of migration to worsen, compelling more people to make the dangerous journey north to cross the border and flee their circumstances.

James Jay Carafano, vice president of the Heritage Foundation’s Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy, said the systems Biden has accused Trump of dismantling simply became unnecessary once Trump had succeeded in curbing illegal immigration through other means.

“They had record low detention, so why would they keep massive centers that they didn’t need?” Carafano told the Washington Examiner.

Carafano called the claim that Trump is to blame because he hampered the Office of Refugee Resettlement “incredibly fatuous on its face.”

“They didn’t need a bigger workforce because they were weeding out all the illegitimate claims at the border,” he said. “If you have a leak, and you plug the leak, you don’t need to call the plumber every day. But if you’re just going to let the leaks multiply, you can’t hire enough plumbers.”

Trump did indeed direct the State Department to cut aid to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras in 2019, when he faced his own migration surge, after lamenting that the Northern Triangle countries had not done enough to stop their citizens from leaving to come to the United States.

But Trump promised to reinstate the aid later in the year after negotiating asylum-related agreements with each of the countries. Those agreements required migrants to seek asylum first in another “safe” country before they could try for asylum in the U.S.

Slashing the aid did not increase illegal immigration, however; according to CBP data, border encounters fell every month from May 2019, shortly after the aid cuts occurred, to October 2019, when the Trump administration offered to resume aid.

Far from aggravating the migration problem, as the Biden White House now claims aid cuts did, the move actually helped pressure Central American countries to stem the exodus of their citizens.

Why Republicans blame Biden

Republicans have placed blame for the latest surge squarely on Biden’s immigration promises, pointing to numbers that show the pace of border crossings picked up dramatically after he took office.

GOP lawmakers have argued the number of people entering the U.S. spiked because Biden ended a Trump-era policy, known popularly as “Remain in Mexico,” that forced asylum-seekers to stay on the southern side of the border while their asylum claims were adjudicated. After Biden reversed that policy on the first day of his presidency, his administration allowed thousands of people who were waiting in Mexico to hear about their asylum cases to enter the country.

R.J. Hauman, government relations director for the right-leaning Federation for American Immigration Reform, said ending the Remain in Mexico policy (called the Migrant Protection Protocols) could be one of the worst mistakes the Biden administration has made.

“They attached an effective policy to a person they despise. Trump was behind it, therefore it’s evil and must be rescinded immediately,” Hauman told the Washington Examiner. “Quite possibly the biggest blunder in the first 100 days.”

Biden also used the earliest days of his presidency to announce an end to construction of the border wall, which Trump had touted as a symbolic and, eventually, a literal deterrent for people considering an attempt to cross the border. Republicans have claimed the announcement reinforced the message to would-be migrants that the border is open.

One of the Biden administration’s most frequently promised solutions has been, in recent days, to speed up processing for minors in custody at the border; Biden officials have argued doing so will help alleviate some of the overcrowding issues seen at migrant facilities on the border.

But critics say the public promise to process cases quickly, potentially bypassing some of the usual checks involved and expediting potential release into the U.S., could act as a magnet for even more people to cross or send their children over the border.

“If your primary solution is to quickly process unaccompanied minors, that is going to exacerbate the problem,” Hauman said.

Republicans have argued Biden’s campaign promises to loosen some of the restrictions Trump imposed on the asylum system encouraged migrants to travel to the border after the White House changed hands.

Among the Trump immigration policies that Democrats criticized at the time was a push to narrow the scope of asylum claims that the U.S. considered legitimate, which was done in an effort to speed up and simplify processing for asylum claims.

The Trump administration had moved to limit the reasons migrants could legally request asylum — ending, for example, their ability to receive asylum based on claims of fear that their families could be targeted by gangs in their home countries.

But Biden campaigned on broadening the asylum system so more people could have a chance to qualify.

Finally, Republicans have noted that if the Biden administration continues to release families and children into the U.S. interior, it will continue to incentivize people to cross the border because no deterrents have been put in place. Biden has said his message for would-be migrants is that they should not come to the U.S.; his administration is indeed sending some people, primarily single adults and some family units, back to their home countries under a public health provision known as Title 42.

Enacted under Trump and continued under Biden, Title 42 permits the swift removal of undocumented immigrants due to COVID-19. The Biden administration, however, has not applied the provision as aggressively as Trump did — allowing children and some families to remain in custody during processing, sometimes in overcrowded conditions where the risk of spreading the virus is high.

Carafano argued the Biden administration allowed illegal immigration to “mushroom” when it removed all the hurdles Trump had imposed to keep the flow of migrants down.