President Trump is still trying to avoid responsibility for his administration’s brutal policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the border, but a new report confirms that Trump and his advisors had been considering the extreme measures for as long as they’ve been in power. According to the New York Times, White House senior policy advisor Stephen Miller was “instrumental” in convincing the president to enact the policy, which applies a zero tolerance approach to prosecuting undocumented immigrants caught entering the U.S. — even if that means taking children away from their parents in the process. And while some members of the Trump administration have reportedly been uneasy over the policy and subsequent fallout, Miller is not one of them. “It was a simple decision by the administration to have a zero tolerance policy for illegal entry, period,” Miller told the Times, “The message is that no one is exempt from immigration law.”

Trump administration officials continue to defend the policy as nothing more than them enforcing the law, but in the minds of Miller and other immigration hardliners in the White House, the heartlessness of the policy, as well as all the publicity that indifference gets, are exactly the point. That’s because their goal is deter other immigrants from attempting to enter the U.S. in the first place, even though the effectiveness of such tactics is often difficult to discern.

Despite the fact that Trump had repeatedly demonized and dehumanized immigrants on his way to the presidency, he rejected the policy plan at first, but the true-believing Miller — who was also instrumental in pushing the administration’s Islamophobic travel ban — never gave up. Finally, sometime this spring, Miller convinced the president to endorse the idea. As a result, nearly 2,000 children were taken away from their parents and placed in makeshift government shelters in less than a month and a half under the new policy, and that number has undoubtedly gone up in the weeks since (and separations could soon double in some areas).