The Trump administration will forever be remembered for its barbaric practice of separating immigrant families at the border. But according to a new report from the Washington Post, the zero-tolerance era may have been a compromise of sorts. Earlier this year, White House immigration officials pondered a massive "blitz" of "coordinated raids" to round up undocumented families in ten major cities across the country—a "show of force" aimed at scaring refugees who might otherwise seek asylum in the United States.

The Post reports that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials maintained an "initial target list" of 2,500 adults and children, but contemplated arresting as many as 10,000 people if, presumably, Lou Dobbs found the first wave of sweeps insufficiently tough on innocent people fleeing violence in Central America. Among the proposal's most ardent supporters were senior White House advisor Stephen Miller, who never misses an opportunity to implement white-nationalist philosophy as official government policy.

The revelation appears to be the latest component of former Department of Homeland Security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen's redemption tour, as it positions Miller and his allies as storybook villains, and Nielsen and then-acting ICE director Ron Vitiello as leaders of an internal effort to stop their efforts. Of particular concern to Vitiello were circumstances in which, for example, parents might be arrested while their children were at school, or playing at a friend's house.

Although Nielsen was purportedly aware of the risk that "public outrage" might ensue, her primary objections stemmed not from the self-evident truth that imprisoning children is a morally bankrupt practice whose perpetrators should be in jail. Instead, she believed ICE officials in charge of planning hadn't hammered out enough logistical details of this shock-and-awe campaign for her satisfaction, and that it "might actually backfire by misdirecting resources away from critical border emergency response operations,” according to an anonymous DHS official. Nielsen also apparently protested that the proposal would detract from the administration's pledge to crack down on "criminal aliens," which raises the obvious question of whether the administration ever really draws any such distinction between the types of immigrants it targets.

Their choice to take this position, the Post says, was "a factor" in President Trump's decision to push Nielsen and Vitiello out of office last month. Stephen Miller apparently found Nielsen's waffling to be especially problematic, and told his boss shortly before her dismissal that "some members of his administration don’t have his best interests at heart" and "are too worried about their own reputations to carry out his agenda effectively." What ultimately doomed Kirstjen Nielsen's White House tenure was not her willingness to put infants in cages, but the fact that she didn't want to put as many infants in cages as her colleagues might have liked.