A secret White House plan to arrest thousands of migrant parents and children in 10 U.S. cities was thwarted by resistance from officials who have since been ousted, The Washington Post reports. The plan was reportedly pushed by senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller and was intended to be a show of force against families that had crossed the U.S.-Mexico border after President Trump’s “zero-tolerance” prosecution push in 2018. But then-Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and former top immigration enforcement official Ronald Vitiello put the brakes on it, expressing concerns that there wasn’t time to prepare immigration agents and that the public would have been outraged by the plan. The arrests were reportedly planned for New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles and as many 10,000 migrants were to be targeted. “There was concern that it was being hastily put together, would be ineffective, and might actually backfire by misdirecting resources away from critical border emergency-response operations,” one DHS official told the newspaper.