WASHINGTON — In the unlikely yet profound showdown between the president and the migrant that has captured international attention, the courts have uniformly determined that one of them recently violated the law. And it wasn’t the migrant.

According to liberal and conservative judges all the way up to the Supreme Court, President Donald Trump’s administration broke the rules by deporting Kilmar Abrego Garcia and must try to fix the mistake. But Trump and his team are trying to rewrite the narrative so that it is a dispute about illegal immigration rather than the rule of law.

It is a fight that Trump seems to welcome. His administration could easily have avoided it by simply bringing Abrego Garcia back from El Salvador and following a process that might have resulted in him being deported anyway. Instead, Trump opted to double down, defying the courts and reverse-engineering a justification for a deportation that his administration initially acknowledged was wrong.

This in the view of the president’s team is a political winner with the vast majority of voters, an “80-20 issue,” as his adviser Stephen Miller puts it, referring to theoretical percentages. Trump bolsters his credentials as a scourge of evil immigrants while asserting that his critics care more about foreign-born murderers and thugs than they do about law-abiding Americans. Yet at a time when Trump is claiming unprecedented power in so many arenas, the case of one imprisoned migrant has come to crystallize the debate about whether Trump himself is a law-abiding American.

The president’s goal in recent days has been to present Abrego Garcia as such a dangerous man that it does not matter if the government’s deportation was illegal, in effect arguing that the ends justify the means. Never mind that Abrego Garcia has never been convicted of a crime, the White House now portrays him as a singular threat to public safety without bothering to prove anything.

At a session with reporters Friday, aides handed Trump a sheet with bullet points listing various allegations against Abrego Garcia, some of them rooted in fact and some of them distorted. He is a “foreign terrorist,” Trump alleged, and “not a very innocent guy,” someone whose “record is unbelievably bad.”

“They talk about how evil I am, that this man would be thrown out of our country,” Trump said of his critics. “This man is a — according to certified statements that we get — is a very violent person. And they want this man to be brought back into this country, where he can be free.”

He then went on to cite a “wonderful angel mom” whose daughter was killed by an immigrant in the country illegally. The White House made a point of highlighting her case this past week by bringing her to the briefing room amid the dispute over what to do about Abrego Garcia. But her family’s tragedy, which was unquestionably horrific and devastating, was unrelated to Abrego Garcia, who had nothing to do with it, even though the president essentially seemed to conflate the matters.

“Donald Trump is desperately trying to change the conversation on Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s abduction and disappearance because he’s losing in the courts and in the court of public opinion,” said Kica Matos, president of the National Immigration Law Center.