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 Trump’s administration broke the rules by deporting Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia and must try to fix the mistake. But Mr. 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 Mr. Trump seems to welcome. His administration could easily have avoided it by simply bringing Mr. Abrego Garcia back from El Salvador and following a process that might have resulted in him being deported anyway. Instead, Mr. 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. Mr. 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 Mr. Trump is claiming unprecedented power in so many arenas, the case of one imprisoned migrant has come to crystallize the debate about whether Mr. Trump himself is a law-abiding American.

The president’s goal in recent days has been to present Mr. 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 Mr. 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 in a court of law.

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

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