Reality TV star Donald Trump’s claim last month that hordes of Mexican rapists are streaming over the southern border has been shown to be based on an inaccurate reading of a single news story, but that hasn’t stopped his team from defending it as “partially true.”

“It may not be nice, but it happens to be potentially and partially true,” the 2016 Republican presidential candidates’ adviser Michael Cohen said Monday on CNN. “What Donald Trump has done is he sparked a conversation about, really, immigration reform, and that’s something that I don’t think the Republican Party was prepared at this time for.”