President Donald Trump has been pushing measures to restrict immigration to the United States for years. Now hes using the coronavirus pandemic to justify a crackdown on immigration that puts vulnerable migrants including children at risk and separates families, and could deepen the current economic crisis.

Since declaring a national emergency over COVID-19 in March, Trump has halted refugee resettlement , deported unaccompanied children fleeing violence and abuse, suspended some categories of legal immigration , closed the border to asylum-seekers and repeatedly pushed back court hearings for people awaiting them in Mexico. On Monday, he restricted legal immigration even further via executive order.

Trump has claimed these policies are necessary to prevent the spread of COVID-19 from other countries and to protect American workers from competition for jobs during the pandemic-related financial crisis. But several of the immigration policies rammed through in recent months have been on the presidents to-do list since his first year in office. The pandemic didnt create a need for nativist immigration policies; it simply provided an excuse for them.

That includes the Mexican border wall, an extremely costly campaign promise that Trump continues to push even during an economic downturn. On Tuesday, Trump traveled to Arizona, where COVID-19 cases are spiking, to visit border wall construction and falsely boast that his pet project had protected Americans from COVID-19. I built the wall and it worked 100%, Trump said. The border wall, the president falsely claimed, stopped COVID, it stopped everything, it stopped the whole deal.

This isnt true, but it does fit a pattern for the president, whose focus during the pandemic frequently turns to blaming other countries for it.

During his first address to the nation on COVID-19 in March, Trump made it clear that his primary response to the coronavirus would be to blame other countries and close off U.S. borders . He repeatedly characterized the coronavirus as a foreign virus and argued that banning people from other countries was key to containing the outbreak in the U.S.

Since then, the Trump administration has issued at least 48 policy changes related to the U.S. immigration system, according to a count by the National Immigration Forum, including several that have an indefinite timeline. At the same time, the U.S. has failed to reduce its number of daily new COVID-19 cases , as other countries hard-hit by the virus have managed to do.

Some of the most sweeping changes came via executive order on Monday. The new order bans multiple kinds of new work visas and will go into effect this week, lasting through the end of the year. The policy stops the issuance of the H-1B visa for skilled workers a longtime target for immigration hard-liners the H-2B visa for seasonal workers in industries like hospitality and food processing, the J-1 visa allowing foreigners to participate in summer internships or jobs and the L visa permitting companies to temporarily transfer employees into the U.S.