However much Donald Trump and his allies would like Americans to focus on the scale of what he presents as an unprecedented crackdown on illegal immigration in the United States, much of the country is instead focused on one particular immigrant: Salvadorean-born Kilmar Ábrego García, who was sent back to his native country as part of a high-profile federal operation last month.

Ábrego was not supposed to be sent to El Salvador, as the Government has repeatedly acknowledged. His family had been the target of criminal gangs in that country and an immigration judge determined that he had a “well-founded” fear for his life should he have had to return. Yet there he is today, a prisoner in El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Centre, known as Cecot — along with dozens of other people shipped to the facility in the extensively documented and promoted operation.

Ábrego was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement near his home in Maryland on March 12, three days before the Federal Government rushed to ship him and more than 200 others to Cecot. In prior immigration hearings, Ábrego had been accused — on strikingly flimsy evidence — of association with the gang MS-13, but he was given no chance to rebut any claims of gang affiliation before his removal. Instead of adjudicating that question, in fact, the Government used Ábrego and the others to reinforce how forcefully the administration was dealing with gangsters. Those shipped to Cecot were “heinous monsters, rapists, murderers, kidnappers, sexual assaulters [and] predators,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted on March 17. Analysis from Bloomberg News later determined that 9 in 10 of those flown to the prison on March 15 had no criminal record.

The simple fact is that criminal immigrants are not as pervasive in the United States as Trump insisted on the campaign trail. (As though to emphasise that point, the Justice Department recently removed a link to a study demonstrating that immigrants were less likely to commit crimes than native-born US residents.) Partly because of that, the administration’s high-profile effort to target the purported immigrant threat as a staggering success relies on a tried-and-true Trump tactic: using unverified, false or decontextualised datapoints as rhetorical anecdotes.

It appears likely that the administration’s partnership with El Salvador’s authoritarian president, Nayib Bukele, to send immigrants to Cecot is a function of the extralegal status that then applies to those prisoners. An initial push to send immigrants to Guantánamo Bay — the place recent presidents have put the people they want Americans to fear the most — was de-emphasised in favour of the Cecot operation. The former is undeniably under US control. The latter is not, particularly when the courts are asking.

During a meeting with Bukele on Monday, Trump and his team rejected the idea that they had the ability to compel Ábrego’s release. Bukele suggested that Ábrego was a “terrorist” whom he couldn’t sneak into the United States. An air of self-congratulatory smugness pervaded the Oval Office. They had figured out the loophole.

Another exchange from that meeting, though, showed how Trump is trying to inflate his success on handling immigration.

“What you’re doing with the border is remarkable,” Bukele told Trump — and the assembled news cameras. “It has dropped, what, 95 per cent? It’s incredible.”

“As of this morning, 99 per cent,” Trump replied. “99.1 per cent, to be exact.”

“Why are those numbers not in the media?” Bukele asked. Because, Trump replied, singling out CNN in particular, “they don’t like putting out good numbers”. In fact, he added: “I think they hate our country.”

The real answer, of course, is that it is not clear where this 99 (point-one) per cent comes from. (An e-mail sent to the White House did not receive a reply.) It is true that the number of encounters at the border, as tracked by the Department of Homeland Security, has substantially declined since January.

In March, the number of encounters was down 94 per cent relative to the year prior. It is worth noting, though, that the number of border encounters had been trending down even before Trump took office this year.

In December, for example, the number of encounters was down nearly 70 per cent from December 2023.

At the same time, there has not been a noticeable increase in removal flights undertaken by Ice. Data on those flights is compiled independently by Tom Cartwright for the website Witness at the Border. Last month, Cartwright estimates that there were 807 Ice flights, 311 of them related to the removal of immigrants from the United States. For comparison, Cartwright tracked 310 such flights in October.

Cartwright is also able to determine where those flights are headed. Since the start of the year — and including the last 20 days of Joe Biden’s presidency — Guatemala has been the most frequent destination for Ice flights. (Bolstering the earlier point about Guantánamo Bay, Cartwright’s analysis of Ice’s activity for March notes that the latest flight to El Salvador that month included more than a dozen people who had been incarcerated in Cuba.)

It is possible to estimate how many people have been transferred on these Ice flights, data that Cartwright includes in his analyses. Helpful because, as The Washington Post reported over the weekend, the Federal Government has stopped publishing monthly data on removals, either at Ice’s website or through the Office of Homeland Security Statistics. Neither has published data from 2025.

This may be because Ice deportations under Trump have trailed the number of deportations one year prior under Biden. This is in part because border crossings have declined, reducing a pool of immigrants who can more easily be repatriated.

This gets to a central problem for the President. The Trump Administration wants to quickly deport one million immigrants, itself a much more modest goal than the tens of millions Trump discussed on the campaign trail. But even that is hard, since, as one expert explained to the Post, “the deportation process is time-consuming”.

So, instead of perhaps unflattering verifiable data, we often just get anecdata, numbers from Trump and other officials aimed at reinforcing the idea that immigrants are being expelled from the United States at a staggering clip. Sometimes, those numbers are presented with dubious charts. Sometimes, they are just thrown into conversations. Always, they are backstopped with videos, photos and other images showing how the administration is cracking down. The presentation from the White House is one of unrelenting strength — a presentation that appears to be a Potemkin one.

El Salvador, with the world’s highest rate of incarceration, is happy to help promote that image.

Even more than it does at present, in fact. Before reporters were in the Oval Office on Monday, Trump suggested to Bukele that El Salvador might want to build five more prisons to accommodate what Trump called “home-growns” — native-born Americans who have committed crimes.

This idea is the worst-case example of why the Ábrego story is so important. A court determined that he should not be sent to El Salvador. As of early January, he was living in the United States with the blessing of the Federal Government.

Then came January 20 and Donald Trump and, suddenly, Ábrego was separated from his five-year-old child, put on a flight and sent to the country where he was born. No court reviewed the administration’s action before it occurred and the administration has, so far, declined to apply any obvious pressure on El Salvador to ensure Ábrego’s return to the United States and to his family.

Maybe Trump will ultimately reach his target statistic of one million deportations. Maybe he won’t. In the meantime, the Kilmar Ábrego García tragedy highlights the administration’s indifference towards the rule of law or human decency. Instead of serving as a demonstration of Trump’s unrelenting defence of America, Ábrego serves as a warning about Trump’s indifference to the protections that US residents enjoyed as of January 19, 2025.

• Philip Bump is a Washington Post columnist based in New York. He writes the newsletter How To Read This Chart and is the author of The Aftermath: The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America