Vance claimed he didn’t mean that he was deliberately spreading falsehoods. But he was offering a rather Machiavellian justification. It was effectively: The situation is so bad that I had to do something, even if that something was spreading the thinnest of claims and butchering the known facts in a way that demonized a whole class of migrants.

Vance is now taking a page from that same playbook — this time as vice president of the United States.

Monday brought some long-anticipated news about the evidence against recently deported migrants. The administration two weeks ago rapidly deported hundreds of them to a prison in El Salvador, many without due process because they were allegedly gang members. It relied on a rarely invoked power that had only been used in wartime. But lawyers and family members for several of the migrants have claimed that their tattoos and other evidence were misconstrued and that they didn’t belong to gangs. That raised the possibility that this lack of due process had landed the wrong people in a notorious foreign prison.

Well, we’ve now quickly learned that at least one person was indeed sent there in error. The Trump Justice Department on Monday cited an “administrative error” for including on the deportation flights a man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who legally couldn’t be deported to El Salvador.

This proves the administration’s hasty deportation process was indeed prone to the types of errors avoidable through the due process the administration cast aside. It has been just two weeks, and the government has already been forced to admit that a person was wrongfully deported to a foreign prison, while saying he can’t be returned. What are the odds he’s the only one?

But to Vance, that’s not the main lesson. The main lesson, according to Vance, seems to be that this is acceptable collateral damage.

And if he has to claim things that haven’t actually been established to defend that, he’s apparently going to do that.

Vance on X called Abrego “a convicted MS-13 gang member with no legal right to be here.” He added in a later post that a judge had “determined that the deported man was, in fact, a member of the MS-13 gang.”

It’s true that Abrego immigrated illegally, but it’s not true that he has been “convicted” of being a gang member or proved to be one.

An immigration judge in 2019 found that evidence Abrego was in MS-13 was “sufficient” enough to detain him, and another judge later upheld that ruling, saying the claim that Abrego was in MS-13 wasn’t clearly wrong, according to court documents.

(Vance in his post initially wrongly claimed the first ruling came “under the Biden administration,” before correcting it to note President Donald Trump was in office in 2019.)

But there has been no full adjudication of that claim or any criminal conviction. Abrego was later released from detention and won a ruling that he couldn’t be deported to El Salvador because he faced a credible fear of violence from another gang, Barrio 18, which had targeted him and his family.

Court filings indicate the claim that Abrego was in MS-13 rested largely on someone the immigration judge deemed to be a credible informant and the fact that Abrego was wearing Chicago Bulls attire.

But Abrego has denied he is a gang member. His lawyer’s filing last week said law enforcement had linked him to the Westerns clique of MS-13 but noted it operates out of New York, where Abrego has never lived. His lawyer also said he inquired with the Prince George’s County Police Department in Maryland to seek the detective who had written the report linking Abrego to the gang and was informed the detective had been “suspended.”

This isn’t a case where the administration definitely wrongly accused someone of being a gang member, and it can point to court filings that at least substantiate the claim that Abrego was one. But the evidentiary standards required to detain Abrego back then come up well shy of a criminal conviction. And again, this man wasn’t just deported; he was sent along with hundreds of others to a brutal foreign prison in a country where a judge said he faced danger.

The question is whether the 2019 determination of an immigration judge that evidence is credible is due process enough to warrant that effective sentence today.

Vance’s claim about that due process is the other point where his defenses break down.

“Because he is not a citizen, he does not get a full jury trial by peers,” Vance said. “In other words, whatever ‘due process’ he was entitled to, he received.”

Again, part of this is accurate. Undocumented immigrants aren’t entitled to full jury trials as part of their efforts to stay in the country.

But saying Abrego got “whatever ‘due process’ he was entitled to” is extremely debatable. That’s because the Trump administration quite literally just acknowledged that it failed to abide by that due process. A judge had said Abrego couldn’t be deported to El Salvador, and the administration deported him to El Salvador.

“On March 15, 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 Justice Department said in its filing.

The full thrust of Vance’s defense is very much in line with the Trump administration’s public talking points: These people are bad and the situation is bad, so we don’t need so much due process. And are you really going to stand up for someone that could be a gang member?

Vance punctuated his first post by saying that “it’s gross to get fired up about gang members getting deported while ignoring citizens they victimize.”

It’s basically the same justification offered for his claims about Haitian migrants eating pets.

And that more than anything crystallizes the choice here. Are Americans willing to give up the due process rights of people they might not be sympathetic to? Are they willing to resign a person to a brutal prison in a country where a judge said that person faced a legitimate fear of violence, based on a years-old finding that evidence of gang membership was at least credible?

Vance and Trump have spent months building the argument that this is the kind of collateral damage that needs to be accepted. Now, thanks to the administration’s admitted failure, we will find out how much Americans are willing to countenance.