On Thursday, the Washington Post reported that the Trump Administration has tried to pressure Immigration and Customs Enforcement to transport detained immigrants to sanctuary cities and release them there. The proposed policy was apparently conceived, the Post reported, as a retaliatory measure against Trump’s political opponents.

The story illustrates the extent to which the Trump White House believes its own rhetoric, and also some of the dire difficulty of talking and writing about immigration during this war on immigrants. The logic of the proposed policy was classic, crude political bait: if you like it so much, try living it. If sanctuary cities—jurisdictions that, to one extent or another, refuse to coöperate with federal authorities in enforcing restrictive immigration policies—like immigrants so much, let them have more immigrants.

Proposals to move immigrants to sanctuary cities were reportedly rejected by ICE at least twice. CNN and others reported that conflict over the proposals was a factor behind Trump’s removal of senior immigration officials. The Department of Homeland Security reportedly objected that ICE doesn’t have the mandate or the funding to move immigrants within the country.

Some countries assign asylum seekers to particular communities, or to particular facilities within those communities. Such policies in themselves may be benign. What Trump has proposed is not: it is, conceptually, more like an internal deportation of the sort that Russia, for example, has historically inflicted on ethnic minorities. Trump apparently even inquired if it may be possible to arrest migrants from the so-called caravan at the southern border and transport them immediately to sanctuary cities.

An unnamed D.H.S. official told the Post that these ideas were “retaliation, to show them, ‘Your lack of cooperation has impacts.’ ” The available reporting doesn’t tell us exactly why Trump may have viewed these moves as retaliatory. He may assume that more immigrants means more trouble, of the chaotic, criminal variety that he so often conjures. Or, even more cynically, he may assume that any influx of newcomers will stress communities, producing tensions that make life worse for elected officials whom he dislikes. Whatever Trump thinks he wants, the problem for journalists is in finding a way to talk about it that doesn’t validate the President’s assumptions. As often happens with Trump and his policies, this is more difficult than it ought to be.

The Post’s story notes that the move would have “targeted” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, among others. Never does the story question, or suggest, what the mechanism of the imagined “retaliation” would have been—how, exactly, the immigrants would have been expected to create trouble. That subtly affirms the assumption that trouble would have been caused. But the story, like so many Trump-era stories, is a trap: questioning the assumption would have led journalists down the slippery slope of arguing about facts, denying outrageous claims that shouldn’t be given the time it takes to deny them.

CNN, near the top of its story on Thursday night, characterized the Trump proposals as an attempt to “deliver on border security, a key issue for his political base,” thus validating the strange idea that transporting immigrants to cities that welcome them most would somehow shore up the border.

The Times, in its Thursday night story, noted that “once there, the migrants would be released onto the streets—potentially sending a message to the Democratic politicians who oppose Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda and his demands for a wall along the border with Mexico.” How exactly the presence of immigrants would send the message, or, indeed, what the message would be, the paper didn’t specify.

Pelosi’s spokeswoman Ashley Etienne issued a standard statement: “The extent of this administration’s cynicism and cruelty cannot be overstated. Using human beings—including little children—as pawns in their warped game to perpetuate fear and demonize immigrants is despicable.” Like the media, Pelosi, whose district covers the sanctuary city of San Francisco, didn’t directly challenge the unspoken but clear premise that something terrible would happen to these cities if immigrants came to them.

Such is the framing of the issue by the White House, and the framing of the story by the media, that no one had the one right response to this idea: “But this is the very point of a sanctuary city! Immigrants, regardless of status, are safe in them. Bring them here! They are welcome.”