Donald Trump's administration hasn't been shy about its stance on U.S. immigration: they'd like it better if the country had a "Whites Only" sign at every port of entry. This isn't just about the Stephen Miller-approved policy of locking non-white kids in literal cages—the administration is also actively trying to strip citizenship from and deport naturalized citizens. Under Trump, U.S. admission of refugees has plummeted. And in their zeal to throw out a maximum number of people who weren't born here, the White House is now weighing a policy that would make it exponentially harder to become a U.S. citizen in the first place.

In a new report, NBC News found that the administration is trying to unilaterally impose a policy that would bar immigrants from either citizenship or green cards if they've ever used any of a range of social services, including the Affordable Care Act. Per NBC News:

Details of the rulemaking proposal are still being finalized, but based on a recent draft seen last week and described to NBC News, immigrants living legally in the U.S. who have ever used or whose household members have ever used Obamacare, children's health insurance, food stamps and other benefits could be hindered from obtaining legal status in the U.S.

Immigration lawyers and advocates and public health researchers say it would be the biggest change to the legal immigration system in decades and estimate that more than 20 million immigrants could be affected. They say it would fall particularly hard on immigrants working jobs that don't pay enough to support their families.

This is just the latest example of how Trump and his advisers, Miller in particular, are targeting immigrants of all stripes. Trump's apologists often defend his administration's vicious attitude toward immigrants by saying that it's only targeting people in the country illegally, which is demonstrably untrue. Trump has been aggressively stripping the protected status of groups of people who came to the U.S. legally and in many cases have been living, working, and paying taxes here for decades. Along with being petty and heartless, these decisions are also likely to exacerbate future illegal immigration according to Trump's own diplomats.

On top of that, there's no practical reason to penalize people for using social services that exist to be used. Republicans often villify people who have ever had to rely on these services (even as they give billions of dollars in tax cuts to the richest people in the country) and this new policy is an extension of that same philosophy that declares that anyone who has lived in poverty, for any amount of time, deserves to be punished for it.

Will making it harder to become a citizen reduce illegal immigration? Of course not, just as punishing people who need help with groceries or medical bills won't make them need that help less. So what is this policy supposed to accomplish? Like most of the changes Trump and his white nationalist advisers like Stephen Miller have implemented, this seems designed to inflict as much pain as possible while leaving already vulnerable people with no way to become financially, politically, or legally more secure. After all, it's a lot harder to deport some non-criminal, non-Norwegian immigrant once they've become a citizen.