In a primetime televised address Tuesday, President Donald Trump repeated his demand for $5.7 billion in border wall money in order to end the nearly three-week federal government shutdown, offering the deal as the only solution to solve a major national security crisis.

This barrier is absolutely critical to border security. Its also what our professionals at the border want and need, Trump said, describing the impasse as a choice between right and wrong, between justice and injustice.

But the only thing resembling a crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border isnt an existential threat to national security its the question of how to handle a historically high number of Central American families and children coming into the country, many of whom are asking for asylum or some other humanitarian relief from deportation.

The White House position on the issue is clear: Trump wants to either indefinitely detain the Central American migrants or cast them back to Mexico. But the wall wont achieve either of those aims. Instead, the ploy harkens back to the symbolic solution to a largely fabricated crisis that paved Trumps way to the presidency back in 2016.

There was no border crisis when Trump launched his campaign in the summer of 2015, promising to wall off the Southern border. Instead, unauthorized crossings stood at their lowest levels since the 1970s. By the numbers, theres still no crisis the unauthorized population of the United States has remained flat for more than a decade.