President Joe Biden used his State of the Union speech to blame congressional Republicans for not acting to resolve a border crisis that has led to more than 8 million illegal crossings.

The GOP has made immigration central to their critique of the president as polls show he is vulnerable on the issue heading into the November election. However, Biden cited Republicans’ rejection of a border deal that he crafted with a bipartisan working group in the Senate to claim that the party is playing politics with the crisis.

“The result was a bipartisan bill with the toughest set of border security reforms we’ve ever seen in this country,” Biden said in the House of Representatives on Thursday night. “But unfortunately, politics have derailed it so far.”

The rebuttal also served as an opportunity to knock Donald Trump, his likely presidential rival, in a speech laden with references to the former president.

“I’m told my predecessor called Republicans in Congress and demanded they block the bill. He feels it would be a political win for me and a political loser for him,” Biden said. “It’s not about him or me. It’d be a winner for America. My Republican friends you owe it to the American people to get this bill done. We need to act.”

Republicans booed at Biden’s mention of the border deal, which Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ), Chris Murphy (D-CT), and James Lankford (R-OK) spent months developing before rolling it out in February.

Biden touted how the Border Patrol union, the National Border Patrol Council, endorsed the border deal. But Senate Republicans claimed the deal was insufficiently conservative and would have given Biden political cover without actually solving the border crisis.

The plan would have funded the hiring of 1,500 more immigration and customs personnel, roughly 2% of the total 80,000 employees currently on the books. Another 100 immigration judges would have been added to the approximately 700 struggling to make a dent in the 3 million cases waiting to be heard nationwide.

Biden also used the speech to attack Trump for views and actions as president that he said alienated immigrants.

“I will not demonize immigrants saying they ‘poison the blood of our country’ as he said in his own words. I will not separate families. I will not ban people from America because of their faith,” said Biden. “Unlike my predecessor, on my first day in office I introduced a comprehensive plan to fix our immigration system, secure the border, and provide a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers and so much more.”

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The border crisis and illegal immigration have surged past all other voter concerns, including foreign policy, the economy, and abortion, to become the greatest concern, according to primary and caucus exit polling in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.

This growing sentiment among early state voters was reaffirmed by new polling from Monmouth University’s Polling Institute found that 8 in 10 voters from all parties see illegal immigration as either a very serious or somewhat serious problem.