It’s often hard to identify any policies that President Trump truly cares about, but it’s clear that he cares deeply about keeping people from Latin America out of our country. It now appears that’s he sufficiently frantic about the issue that he fired Homeland Security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and abruptly rescinded the nomination of Ronald Vitiello to be the head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). They were terminated because they put the brakes on a plan to launch a major internal deportation operation without adequate planning.

According to the reporting in the Washington Post, it wasn’t moral qualms that caused Nielsen and Vitiello to object. They were more concerned about the plan going awry, causing bad publicity, and possibly derailing Vitiello’s confirmation. They also argued that it would divert limited resources from the border and change their mission prioritizing deportation for criminals.

The plan was ambitious and is apparently still under consideration:

In the weeks before they were ousted last month, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and top immigration enforcement official Ronald Vitiello challenged a secret White House plan to arrest thousands of parents and children in a blitz operation against migrants in 10 major U.S. cities.

According to seven current and former Department of Homeland Security officials, the administration wanted to target the crush of families that had crossed the U.S.-Mexico border after the president’s failed “zero tolerance” prosecution push in early 2018. The ultimate purpose, the officials said, was a show of force to send the message that the United States was going to get tough by swiftly moving to detain and deport recent immigrants — including families with children.

The sprawling operation included an effort to fast-track immigration court cases, allowing the government to obtain deportation orders against those who did not show for their hearings — officials said 90 percent of those targeted were found deportable in their absence. The subsequent arrests would have required coordinated raids against parents with children in their homes and neighborhoods.

Vitiello was particularly concerned about the possibility of arresting parents while their children were in school or at a neighbor’s house, and he called for greater surveillance in the operational plan. But bad optics actually were a key part of the concept, because the point was to create a highly noticeable deterrent effect.

Senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller and ICE deputy director Matthew Albence were especially supportive of the plan, officials said, eager to execute dramatic, highly visible mass arrests that they argued would help deter the soaring influx of families.

It seems that Trump and Miller have been searching for a way to deter people with children from trying to enter the country, but this amounts to an effort to deter people from seeking asylum. They tried separating people from the children but that backfired on them and did little to nothing to stem the flow of refugees. For Miller, the problem is mainly a lack of loyalty and resolve:

Miller has told the president that some members of his administration don’t have his best interests at heart, and that they are too worried about their own reputations to carry out his agenda effectively, according to current and former administration officials.

As designed, the plan would have targeted people who were no-shows for their asylum hearings, and there appears to have been a considerable amount of preliminary work done to draw up a list of targets in ten separate American cities. Yet, despite the effort to be discriminate in their arrests, they were on the verge of launching the operation without adequate resources or contingency planning. For one thing, they didn’t have enough beds for 2,500 people.

Maybe at some point, Trump and Miller will realize that we don’t want to be more horrible than the gangs and violence these people are fleeing. They can keep trying to come up with new and different ways to scare people off attempting entry, but people who flee violence in their home country are not easily dissuaded. People don’t just pack up their things and set off on a thousand mile journey with their children in tow because they’re looking for adventure. Whatever Trump and Miller can concoct in the way of horrors is nothing compared to what compelled them to leave in the first place.

Even so, I’m sure this administration will keep firing people until they get a crew in place that is fully prepared to try.