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The Trump administration’s vendetta against Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the “Maryland man” it illegally deported to El Salvador who has become the face of a half-baked and lawless immigration policy, took another turn on Wednesday when the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) doxed him from its official social media account.

In an effort to paint him as a man who deserves to rot in the gulag to which the Trump administration sent him, DHS published excerpts of a temporary protective order that Abrego Garcia’s wife filed against him in 2021.

There are a couple of things that are particularly noteworthy here.

The first is that DHS did not bother to redact the couple’s address and phone number (or that of the wife’s mother), which either speaks of breathtaking incompetence or malice.

The second is that this is the evidence the Trump administration chooses to present to show that Abrego Garcia is a bad guy after previously accusing him of being an MS-13 leader, a terrorist, and a human trafficker.

Obviously, domestic violence is a serious issue. The six-week protective order states that Abrego Garcia punched and scratched his wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura.

In a statement provided to Newsweek, she downplayed the incident that led to her taking this step.

“After surviving domestic violence in a previous relationship, I acted out of caution after a disagreement with Kilmar by seeking a civil protective order in case things escalated,” Vasquez Sura told the magazine. “Things did not escalate, and I decided not to follow through with the civil court process.”

She also stated that the couple’s marriage, with the help of counseling, has grown stronger since the incident.

“No one is perfect, and no marriage is perfect,” added Vasquez Sura, who has pleaded with Donald Trump, a convicted felon who was found liable for sexually abusing a New York writer and has cheated on all of his three wives, to bring her husband home.

And while the protective order does not cast Abrego Garcia in a favorable light, its revelation does nothing to back up some of the accusations administration officials have levied against him.

For example, Trump and others have called him a “terrorist” and compared him to Osama bin Laden.

“The media would love for you to believe that this is a media darling, that he is just a Maryland father,” stated DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin. “Osama Bin Laden was also a father, and yet, he was not a good guy, and they actually are both terrorists.”

And Sebastian Gorka, a deputy assistant to the president, mused on Wednesday whether those trying to help Abrego Garcia may be liable for “aiding and abetting” a terrorist.

Then there is Attorney General Pam Bondi, who first accused him of being a member of MS-13 before promoting him Wednesday to being “one of the top members” of the gang.

However, Abrego Garcia has never been charged with or convicted of a crime, and the only evidence the government has provided to show that he is a member of MS-13 is the statement of an informant and a “Gang Field Interview Sheet” in which an officer describes an encounter with Abrego Garcia and a couple of known MS-13 members. The document states that Abrego Garcia’s clothing was consistent with that of a member of the gang and that he had more than $1,000 in cash in his possession.

In any case, and this is the key issue that most people overlook, it does not actually matter whether Abrego Garcia is a model citizen or not.

What does matter is that he should not have been deported to El Salvador, because there was a court order in place saying he must not be returned to his native country, and because a judge had ordered the flights that took him there to remain in the United States.

In addition, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the US government should try to get him back from El Salvador, which is another decision the Trump administration is ignoring.

Ultimately, while the administration wants to make this about one person that the White House is portraying as a serious criminal, it is actually about something much more important: the rule of law and the protections that the Constitution accords to all residents of the United States.

And those do not just apply to good family men without criminal records.

The bottom line is that the government should feel free to charge Abrego Garcia with anything it wants: terrorism, human trafficking, gang membership.

Then a court of law gets to determine whether any of these charges stick and, if so, to punish him accordingly.

That is how the system is supposed to work, not by making Abrego Garcia and others with no criminal record disappear to a prison camp in El Salvador and throwing away the key.

And that raises the most important question of them all: Why is the Trump administration, which has admitted that Abrego Garcia should not have been deported to El Salvador, trying so hard to keep him and all of the others there?

In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.