The Irrelevant Distraction

How Character Assassination Normalizes Constitutional Collapse

Photo by Greg Bulla on Unsplash

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And when our constitutional system is under attack, those who wish to normalize the violation will always attempt to change the subject.

New reporting highlighting a 2022 traffic stop where Abrego García was questioned about transporting workers represents a textbook example of irrelevant distraction. Let's be absolutely clear: whether Abrego García once gave rides to coworkers has zero bearing on the constitutional crisis at hand. None.

This reporting is clearly designed to plant seeds of doubt, to shift focus from the administration's defiance of the Supreme Court to questions about Abrego García's character. It's a strategy as old as authoritarianism itself: dehumanize those whose rights you violate, find something—anything—that might make people less sympathetic to them, and hope this emotional manipulation trumps principled thinking.

The traffic stop in question did not result in charges. The police dashboard camera footage shows what appears to be nothing more than carpooling to work. Yet the framing of this non-event as somehow newsworthy reveals the real purpose: to retroactively justify what cannot be legally justified.

Let's examine what's happening here. Despite having legal protection against deportation, Abrego García was deported. Despite a unanimous Supreme Court order for his return, he remains in El Salvador. These are constitutional violations of the highest order. So what's the response? Not to address these violations, but to attempt to dirty the victim's reputation by highlighting a routine traffic stop from two years ago.

This isn't journalism. It's character assassination masquerading as context. And its purpose is not to inform but to confuse—to make you question whether constitutional principles should apply in this specific case, to suggest that perhaps executive defiance of judicial authority is justified when the person in question isn't perfectly sympathetic.

The dehumanization serves another purpose as well. By focusing on whether Abrego García might have committed some minor infraction, the reporting diverts attention from the human cost of his deportation—from his wife struggling alone, from his children with autism who now lack their father's support, from the real suffering inflicted on a family when constitutional protections fail.

The strategy is as transparent as it is morally bankrupt. Unable to defend the constitutional violation on its merits, the administration and its media allies attempt to redirect the conversation to immigration policy, to border security, to anything except the fundamental question at hand: Must the executive branch comply with Supreme Court orders?

Remember what's real. The traffic stop is not relevant. The carpooling allegations are not relevant. The only relevance would be if Abrego García had been charged with a crime that would have negated his protected status—which did not happen.

What is relevant is that a unanimous Supreme Court has ordered his return, and that order has been defied. What is relevant is that we are witnessing a direct attack on judicial authority by the executive branch. What is relevant is that the constitutional crisis continues while we are encouraged to debate irrelevancies.

No amount of distraction, no character assassination campaign, no irrelevant traffic stop from years ago changes the fundamental reality: In a constitutional republic, court orders must be followed. When they are not, we no longer live in a democracy governed by law but in an autocracy governed by whim.

“In matters of truth and justice, there is no difference between large and small problems, for issues concerning the treatment of people are all the same.”

— Albert Einstein