The issue of US border control policies suddenly flared up last week, as things tend to do when it comes out that a government has lost nearly 1,500 children and sent some of them into the arms of human traffickers. As always, this was compounded by Trump’s Clarissa-like need to constantly narrate his life to the audience, with his tweet urging his followers to “put pressure on the Democrats to end the horrible law that separates children from there [sic] parents once they cross the Border into the U.S” setting off an added firestorm.

Liberal outlets and other anti-Trumpers clamored to point out that: a) it’s Republicans, not Democrats, who control Congress at the moment; b) it isn’t a law; and c) that it was in fact a policy change with a paper trail that was specifically instituted by the Trump administration to deter future migrants. It was, it seemed, another example of Trump baselessly blaming Democrats for unpopular things he himself had done.

The whole episode perfectly illustrates how immigration — or the government’s mistreatment of migrants, to be specific — has of late turned into a game of political hot potato, not helped by the fact that it’s an incredibly confusing issue. The nearly 1,500 missing children were widely conflated with Trump’s family-separation policy, for instance, but those kids were actually minors who crossed the border by themselves.