Yes, there’s a crisis on the border. And it’s Trump’s fault.

The president’s wall is, in other words, unmoored from operational reality. A wall will not make Central America a better place to live. A wall will not stop asylum seekers from coming to the United States and being able to claim asylum. A wall will not address, let alone fix, the issues with America’s asylum system and immigration courts. The president’s attacks on Mexico and Central America, coupled with the lack of a coherent strategy for the region, have made harder the already difficult work of addressing the underlying drivers of illegal migration from Central America. Instead of working to address these problems, the president has actively made the problem worse by redirecting resources and attention to his irrelevant wall, antagonizing the people he needs to partner with to actually solve immigration problems, exacerbating backlogs and resource shortages by shutting down the government and announcing enforcement measures that cannot be sustained and which result in increasing numbers of migrants calling his bluffs.

The president may want to implement harsh border security policies, but he has faltered on the basics of governing. The administration has failed at the fundamental tasks of coordinating its plans with the relevant agencies and working through the hard problems of implementation. For instance, the administration’s “zero tolerance” policy of prosecuting illegal border-crossers wasted scarce prosecutorial and detention resources and could never be operationally sustained. The family separation policy—a stain on America’s moral authority—was not vetted and coordinated within the government, leading to confused implementation that still has not been resolved. Instead, DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, to preserve her position, has been reduced to a yes woman, kowtowing to every pronouncement the president makes. The enduring images of the secretary’s tenure have been her lame denials of a family separation policy and lockstep support of the president’s wall demands, even as many in her department worked without pay during the shutdown. The professionals who know what it takes to solve the problem are not consulted but rather relegated to following orders.