On Thursday, the Washington Post reported that the White House twice pondered busing immigrant detainees to “sanctuary cities” in order to exact revenge on local Democratic politicians. San Francisco, represented in Congress by House speaker Nancy Pelosi, was just one of several “Democratic strongholds” under consideration. In the mindset of the current administration—which includes more than one member who refers to immigrants as “animals”—there is nothing scarier than releasing impoverished refugees upon unsuspecting communities.

The inquiries, says the Post, coincided with the November midterm elections, when Trump began issuing ominous, near-daily warnings about a “migrant caravan” (composed mostly of women and children) walking from Central America towards the U.S.-Mexico border, as well as February’s government shutdown, which Trump engineered in an ultimately-fruitless effort to secure funding for his doomed border wall. It is not a surprise which of the West Wing’s resident white nationalists concocted this scheme and presented it for official consideration.

Senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller discussed the proposal with ICE, according to two DHS officials. Matthew Albence, who is ICE’s acting deputy director, immediately questioned the proposal in November.

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Miller declined to comment. His name did not appear on any of the documents reviewed by the Post. But as he is White House senior adviser on immigration policy, officials at ICE understood that he was pressing the plan.

Much of the Post’s coverage focuses on the story’s purported unsung heroes, who worked hard to keep this idea from moving beyond the realm of Stephen Miller’s fever dreams about establishing a white ethnostate. Anonymous Homeland Security officials characterized the notion as “unnerving,” and unnamed government attorneys determined that it was “inappropriate” and “lacked a legal basis.” These details are exonerating for the administration in the same way that a would-be murderer’s last-second decision not to pull the trigger qualifies as exonerating, too.

In an email to the White House policy office, Albence detailed several specific grounds for his objections. Miller’s plan entailed “PR risks,” he opined, and was not a “justified expenditure.” The government might incur liability in the event of a transportation accident, and given ICE’s other responsibilities, busing immigrants to New York or Chicago to own the libs would impose an “unnecessary operational burden” on the agency. If any part of Albence’s consternation stemmed from the amorality inherent in using brown people as pawns in a vengeance-fueled effort to foment xenophobia, it was not apparent in the reported correspondence.

Naturally, the story has become part of erstwhile Homeland Security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen’s redemption tour, as CNN reports that Trump “personally pushed” her to implement the plan, and she “resisted” until her legal team was able to produce an analysis that killed it. The implication is that Nielsen, who helmed the administration’s successful efforts to take immigrant infants and children from their parents and lock them away in cages, is nonetheless deserving of gratitude, because scuttling the administration’s unsuccessful efforts to spite its enemies by importing immigrant prisoners constitutes evidence of her sound moral compass.

There is a telling distinction in the rationales on which Nielsen relies when making hard choices: Forcibly separating families at the border was legal, and therefore an acceptable thing for her to do. Shipping desperate asylum seekers from the border to faraway Democratic cities, according to the attorneys with whom DHS happened to consult on the matter, was not legal, and therefore she could not carry out any attendant orders in good conscience.

Among bad people seeking absolution for their malevolence, citing to evidence of their legal compliance is a time-honored rhetorical strategy. Its effect is to quietly dispense with any obligation to exercise independent judgment, and to consider whether a given course of action might be defensible in any place other than a court of law. Such helpless appeals to authority are a perfect crutch for those who know something is wrong, but cannot summon the courage to say so. The cruelty the Trump administration is willing to inflict on immigrants is limited only by its desire to avoid bad press, its reluctance to spend taxpayer dollars, and its ability to search out a lawyer who will give their latest demented nightmare plan the coveted all-clear.