What did Donald Trump do today?

He tried to blackmail an immigrant into pleading guilty to felonies to cover up his own mistakes.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran citizen living in the United States under a protective order, became the face of Trump's second-term immigration policy when he and roughly 250 other people were unlawfully sent to a notorious Salvadoran prison camp. They were identified as members of a Venezuelan street gang, Tren de Aragua, based on shoddy evidence (or none) because of the supposed "national security threat" it posed. Trump and his newly-installed appointees at the Department of Justice ignored court orders for months, at times openly mocking the judges who issued them. 

Abrego Garcia came to particular attention because, as a Salvadoran living under a court-supervised arrangement, he was supposed to be protected from deportation back to El Salvador because of the threat of violence he faced if he returned there. The Trump administration eventually claimed that his deportation was an "administrative error" but refused to comply with court orders to have him returned, even though it was paying the Salvadoran government to imprison deportees and had full control over the situation.

Abrego Garcia and other deportees were eventually returned to the United States, but the Trump administration—having quickly burned through public goodwill on its handling of immigration—insisted he was a member of a different gang and hastily charged him with various crimes, including human trafficking. 

The allegation that he was a member of the MS-13 gang was based on the opinion of a disgraced police officer who was subsequently fired for leaking police information to a sex worker he was involved with. But in what appears to have been a serious attempt to bolster the credibility of that claim, Trump released an obviously manipulated photo showing fake "tattoos" on Abrego Garcia's fingers reading "MS-13."

 

No actual evidence that Abrego Garcia committed these crimes has ever been publicly released, and he has strenuously denied them. 

Today, with his pretrial release from a Tennessee jail imminent, the Trump administration announced plans to deport Abrego Garcia again, this time to the African nation of Uganda—unless he agreed to plead guilty to the felonies he is charged with. Arrangements had already been made to send him to Costa Rica instead, a vastly more suitable destination.

In other words, Trump is trying to force an immigrant whose botched deportation humiliated him into choosing between pleading guilty to politically-motivated charges, or being sent to a country on a different continent from his country of origin where he has no cultural or language fluency.

Trump has made a point of using third-party country deportations as punishment for using legal means to resist removal, such as when he sent immigrants from a variety of countries to South Sudan, a country in the middle of its own humanitarian crisis. For obvious reasons, people deported to countries where they do not speak the local language or have ties to the culture are at severe risk of endangerment. 

Why does this matter? 

• Leaders who don't screw up this badly don't have to punish the people who embarrass them by making it clear how badly they screwed up. 

• Ruining Abrego Garcia's life won't make Trump right, or even make him look right.