President Donald Trump urged Democrats on Sunday to help fix immigration laws — not “resist” them.

He said this after the plight of illegal immigrant children separated from their parents at the border suddenly dominated headlines for a week.

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“Democrats, fix the laws. Don’t RESIST. We are doing a far better job than Bush and Obama, but we need strength and security at the Border! Cannot accept all of the people trying to break into our Country. Strong Borders, No Crime!” Trump tweeted Sunday.

Trump insisted that the U.S. “cannot allow” illegal immigrants “to invade our Country” at will — even as congressional Republicans and Democrats remain at an immigration reform impasse after a hardline House immigration enforcement bill went down in flames last week, and a pro-amnesty House bill vote was rescheduled for lack of votes for passage.

Even if the House had approved the pro-amnesty measure, it faced a grim future in the Senate, which requires 60 votes to end debate on a measure and put it up for final consideration.

“When somebody comes in, we must immediately, with no Judges or Court Cases, bring them back from where they came,” Trump tweeted. “Our system is a mockery to good immigration policy and Law and Order. Most children come without parents … Our Immigration policy, laughed at all over the world, is very unfair to all of those people who have gone through the system legally and are waiting on line for years! Immigration must be based on merit — we need people who will help to Make America Great Again!”

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The Trump administration’s zero-tolerance border policy, instituted earlier in 2018, drew bipartisan ire after stories and pictures of children separated from their illegal immigrant parents at the border saturated TV screens and front pages last week (though not all was as it seemed). The policy resulted in the prosecution of adults apprehended after illegally crossing the border, thus separating parents from their children.

As a result, Trump issued an executive order Wednesday emphasizing his commitment “to protecting our nation’s borders during a historic influx of illegal alien border crossers, while taking action under current legal constraints to prevent the separation of illegal alien families.”

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) statistics show that 21 percent of the estimated 2,300 separated illegal immigrant children have been reunited with their parents, Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) told CNN’s Jake Tapper Sunday on “State of the Union.”

The federal government is also caring for approximately 10,000 illegal immigrant children who came across the border unaccompanied by an adult since 2014.

Although many Democrats and media members were swift to pin the blame for the family separations solely on the Trump administration, Johnson argued that “this mess goes back decades.”

“We don’t have the capacity to handle all the unaccompanied children, all the family units that are now flooding our border because of a host of judicial decisions, legal precedent, and laws, I think very well-intentioned — but [they] have negative unintended consequences that have created … these incentives for people to flood our borders,” Johnson lamented.

“We just don’t have the capacity. But this problem’s been around for a long time,” Johnson added. “You take a look at what might have caused all this.”

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Pointing to the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, Johnson noted that “we had 4,000 unaccompanied children from Central America coming in here” prior to DACA’s implementation.

“Then President Obama instituted Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. And you can see the result. Since that point in time, over 200,000 unaccompanied children have come in from Central America,” he said. “In addition to that, if you take a look at family units, we have more than 399,000 family units who have come in because of our laws, because of the way we treat them. It creates an incentive.”

Jeh Johnson admitted that the Obama administration bore part of the blame for the controversy many pinned solely on the Trump administration.

“If you total that all up, it’s almost 900,000 individuals coming into this country illegally because of our laws and legal precedent, 900,000,” Johnson added. “We have to fix our laws. We have to end those incentives.”

Even Obama’s former DHS secretary, Jeh Johnson, admitted on “Fox News Sunday” that the Obama administration bore part of the blame for the controversy many pinned solely on the Trump administration.

“Without a doubt the images, and the reality, from 2014, just like 2018, are not pretty,” Johnson said while reacting to an infamous 2014 photo of detained children. “We expanded it. I freely admit it was controversial. We believed it was necessary at the time. I still believe it is necessary to remain a certain capability for families.”

PoliZette writer Kathryn Blackhurst can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter.

(Photo credit, homepage image: Donald Trump speaking with supporters at a campaign rally at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona, CC BY-SA 2.0, by Gage Skidmore).