President Joe Biden shuffled into the East Room of the White House Tuesday, blamed Republicans for starting the border crisis he created, announced new executive actions he could have taken at any time in the last three and a half years to fix it, and then shuffled out again without taking any questions about why he was acting now, in an election year, rather than earlier.

It was a standard performance by an 81-year-old who has either forgotten his past immigration policies or is in denial about what they caused.

Here’s the reality. The southern border was under control when Donald Trump was in office, with just 73,994 migrants arrested for illegally crossing in the month before Biden became president. On his first day in office, Biden ended Trump’s successful “Remain in Mexico” policy and halted deportations. The number of illegal migrants immediately spiked to more than 100,000 the next month.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas then issued a new enforcement memo making it Biden administration policy not even to try to deport illegal immigrants whose only crime was being in the country illegally. This caused illegal crossings to spike even higher, reaching 173,277 a month, a number higher than any single month of Trump’s presidency, yet a number Biden has not been able to limit it to at any time since.

Biden’s policies caused the border crisis that is bankrupting schools and hospitals nationwide, and voters know it. Before he became president, voters trusted Biden over Trump on immigration by 1 point. Now voters trust Trump over Biden by 27 points. It is Biden’s worst issue, even worse than inflation and the economy.

Biden hopes voters will believe him when he says, “I’ve come here today to do what the Republicans in Congress refused to do … take the necessary steps to secure our border.”

The problem is, everything Biden announced was something he could have done at any point before yesterday. The border crisis did not begin “four months ago,” as Biden tried to claim yesterday. It started when he was sworn into office and it will only end when Biden leaves.

Because he refused to answer any questions after his speech, there is still much we do not know about what his new immigration policy really is. Biden said he was taking action to “bar migrants who cross our southern border unlawfully from receiving asylum,” but this doesn’t really tell us what will happen to those arrested by Border Patrol.

If they are from Mexico, they will be sent back, but that is current law. What if they are from one of the many countries that do not accept deported migrants from the United States? Will they be detained? Released? Neither Biden nor the White House said. As CBS News noted, the White House “did not say Mexico had agreed to take them back, raising the specter that some migrants will still be released with court notices.”

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The new policy may be to deny migrants who cross the border illegally asylum status, but if the new policy is also to release them into the country, whether they will ever obtain asylum status or not, the problem is not solved at all.

For all his complaining about Republicans in Congress, the real problem on the southern border is Mexico. Trump solved this by forcing Mexico to take migrants back through his Migrant Protection Protocols program. Biden has chosen not to make the return of migrants a priority of his. Our nation has suffered and is continuing to suffer as a direct result.