By fighting the deportation of Abrego Garcia, Trump seeks to move attention

In the unlikely but deep test of strength between the president and the migrant who drew international attention, the courts have uniformly determined that one of them recently violated the law. And it was not the migrant.

According to liberal and conservative judges to the Supreme Court, the administration of President Trump broke the rules by expelling Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia and must try to repair the error. But Mr. Trump and his team try to rewrite the story so that it is a dispute over illegal immigration rather than on the rule of law.

This is a fight that Mr. Trump seems to welcome. His administration could easily have avoided it by simply bringing Mr. Abrego Garcia from Salvador and following a process that could have been expelled anyway. Instead, Trump chose to double, defying courts and retro-engineer justification for an expulsion that his administration initially recognized was wrong.

In the opinion of the president’s team is a political winner with the vast majority of voters, a “80-20 number”, as his advisor Stephen Miller says, referring to theoretical percentages. Trump strengthens his references as a scourge of evil immigrants while affirming that his criticisms are more careful about the murderers and thugs born abroad than on laws respectful of the laws. However, at a time when Mr. Trump claims an unprecedented power in so many areas, the case of a imprisoned migrant came to crystallize the debate on the question of whether Mr. Trump himself is an American-respecting American.

The president’s objective in recent days has been to present Mr. Abrego Garcia as a dangerous man that it does not matter that the eviction of the government was illegal, arguing that the ends justify the means. It does not matter that Mr. Abrego Garcia has never been found guilty of a crime, the White House now portrays him as a singular threat to public security without worrying about proving anything before a court.

On Friday, during a session with journalists, Aid gave Mr. Trump a leaf of bullets listing various allegations against Mr. Abrego Garcia, some of whom in fact and some of them distorted. He is a “foreign terrorist”, alleged Trump, and “not a very innocent guy”, someone whose “file is incredibly bad”.