The media are on the hunt for a bad story they can hang around President Trump’s neck. Why? Because President Trump’s approval rating continues to hover around 50%, which is a historic high for him.

The SignalGate story basically went nowhere because the truth is that everybody has, at one point or another, included somebody in a group chat by accident and it gets very awkward. The actual result of the Signal chat was kind of an embarrassing snafu. The military strikes on the Houthis, however, were totally successful. The United States military is currently eviscerating the Houthis in Yemen.

So the media continue on the hunt.

There are certain stories that are so bad for an administration that they end up hampering their ability to do anything because association with the administration becomes toxic. And there have been many cases of this over the course of modern American history.

The Hunter Biden laptop story, for example, hovered over the Biden administration for the entirety of his term. Sometimes a single story can shift an entire election cycle. In 2006, Republicans looked like they were in decent shape for the midterm elections. But there was a Republican congressperson named Mark Foley who allegedly had been sleeping with some of his aides. Because of that, Republicans ended up getting shellacked.

WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show

With the media on the hunt, they are digging into the immigration realm. Thus, there is a story from The Atlantic, written by Nick Miroff, that was intended to do serious damage to the Trump administration. The story was titled, “An ‘Administrative Error’ Sends a Maryland Father to a Salvadoran Prison.”

The idea here is that the most popular element of Trump’s agenda — by far right now — is his immigration portfolio. He has done more on the border than any president in modern American history by far.

“The Trump administration says that it mistakenly deported an immigrant with protected status but that courts are powerless to order his return,” The Atlantic piece started. “The Trump administration acknowledged in a court filing Monday that it had grabbed a Maryland father with protected legal status and mistakenly deported him to El Salvador, but said that U.S. courts lack jurisdiction to order his return from the megaprison where he’s now locked up.”

On its face, that’s a bad story for the Trump administration. If they just took a random, innocent guy from El Salvador who had protected status and then threw him into a prison in El Salvador, that would be a really bad story. A major screw-up. And if the administration said they couldn’t do anything to fix it, an even bigger screw up.

According to The Atlantic:

The case appears to be the first time the Trump administration has admitted to errors when it sent three planeloads of Salvadoran and Venezuelan deportees to El Salvador’s grim “Terrorism Confinement Center” on March 15. Attorneys for several Venezuelan deportees have said that the Trump administration falsely labeled their clients as gang members because of their tattoos. Trump officials have disputed those claims. But in Monday’s court filing, attorneys for the government admitted that the Salvadoran man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, had been deported accidentally. “Although ICE was aware of his protection from removal to El Salvador, Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error,” the government told the court. Trump lawyers said the court has no ability to bring Abrego Garcia back now that he is in Salvadoran custody.

The lawyer for Garcia is asking for the court to order the Trump administration to ask for Abrego Garcia’s return.

“Trump-administration attorneys told the court to dismiss the request on multiple grounds, including that Trump’s “primacy in foreign affairs” outweighs the interests of Abrego Garcia and his family,” The Atlantic reported.

The lawyer for Garcia said, “They claim that the court is powerless to order any relief. If that’s true, the immigration laws are meaningless—all of them—because the government can deport whoever they want, wherever they want, whenever they want, and no court can do anything about it once it’s done.”

Here is where The Atlantic gets itself into trouble. So far, it’s a bad story for the administration. They took a man who shouldn’t have been deported and they deported him. And the Trump administration admits he shouldn’t have been deported.

The Atlantic continued:

Abrego Garcia, who is married to a U.S. citizen and has a 5-year-old disabled child who is also a U.S. citizen, has no criminal record in the United States, according to his attorney. The Trump administration does not claim he has a criminal record, but called him a “danger to the community” and an active member of MS-13, the Salvadoran gang that Trump has declared a foreign terrorist organization. Sandoval-Moshenberg said that those charges are false, and that the gang label stems from a 2019 incident when Abrego Garcia and three other men were detained in a Home Depot parking lot by a police detective in Prince George’s County, Maryland. During questioning, one of the men told officers that Abrego Garcia was a gang member, but the man offered no proof and police said they didn’t believe him, filings show. Police did not identify him as a gang member.

But here is where The Atlantic screws it up. This is what makes this story at least partially fake news.

As John Hasson reported, “An Immigration judge found that Garcia was an MS-13 member, a flight risk, and a threat to the community SIX YEARS AGO.”

That is not included in the story. Instead, you get the story from this guy’s lawyer that says he was just an innocent person who was wrapped up in a bunch of bad testimony from people with whom he was hanging out at a Home Depot parking lot.

But according to the actual legal filings:

During the course of his proceedings, Abrego-Garcia remained in ICE custody because the Immigration Judge (IJ) with the Executive Office for Immigration Review denied Abrego-Garcia bond at a hearing on April 24, 2019, citing danger to the community because “the evidence show[ed] that he is a verified member of [Mara Salvatrucha] (‘MS-13’)]” and therefore posed a danger to the community. The IJ also determined that he was a flight risk.

There was an administrative error here. That is true. So what exactly was the administrative error?

On March 12, 2025, ICE Homeland Security Investigations arrested Abrego-Garcia due to his prominent role in MS-13. Over the next two days, Abrego-Garcia was transferred to the staging area for the removal flights … The operation that led to Abrego-Garcia’s removal to El Salvador was designed to only include individuals with no impediments to removal. Generally, individuals were not placed on the manifest until they were cleared for removal. ICE was aware of this grant of withholding of removal at the time of Abrego-Garcia’s removal from the United States. Reference was made to this status on internal forms.

So, years ago an immigration judge labeled this guy a member of MS-13 and a flight risk. Despite that, they placed an order to withhold removal upon him because he had a credible fear of being harmed by people back in his home country.

That was the screw-up. He was on the list as an alternate.

But how exactly is it that The Atlantic fails to mention that an immigration judge literally found that there was credible evidence that he was MS-13, which changes the entire nature of the story? It turns this from a horrifyingly terrible story in which an innocent person with no connections to any form of criminal activity and a five-year-old son with disabilities and an American wife is removed for no good reason, to a story where a credibly-accused and legally-found MS-13 gang member, according to this immigration judge, is removed by accident despite a withholding of removal order.

In other words, it’s a bureaucratic screw-up and the guy shouldn’t have been removed. But it is not a human tragedy if somebody who is involved in MS-13 ends up being removed from the country.

It’s this sort of desperate hunger for a story to use as a baton against the Trump administration that leads so many members of the mainstream legacy media to play up the headline.