This is not to downplay the viciousness of MS-13—the gang is appallingly violent. Nor is it to suggest that ICE doesn’t work to combat MS-13. But ICE is just one of several agencies fighting the gang, and Trump has consistently overstated what ICE does. Other federal entities, including the Justice Department, also play a major role, and the DOJ has made large grants to local police departments to do their own enforcement work. Trump, meanwhile, has overstated the number of deportations of MS-13 members that ICE has conducted, and has falsely claimed the agency is setting new records.

As is often the case with Trump’s falsehoods, it’s hard to know whether he misunderstands what ICE does or is intentionally stretching the truth. Either way, there are several reasons why this particular distortion is helpful to him.

First, MS-13 is a nexus of crime, race, and immigration—three issues that fire up Trump’s supporters. The gang is non-white, violent and dangerous, and composed significantly of immigrants. Despite its outsize reputation, it’s actually comparatively smaller than other famous gangs, such as the Crips and Bloods, and commits fewer murders than those larger groups, too. But MS-13 is the perfect foil for Trump (and his supporters) in speeches and tweets. Speaking about ICE as if it’s practically a band of commandos, liberating whole towns, helps instill the panic that Trump likes to sow and allows him to posture as a war president—a status commanders in chief have sought for decades.

Second, ICE is a more useful vehicle for Trump’s MS-13 rhetoric than other immigration-related agencies. Trump once romanced Customs and Border Protection, another agency under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security. The Border Patrol agents’ union endorsed Trump in the 2016 election, much to his delight. But more recently there’s been tension between the president and the rank-and-file. The union’s head has been critical of Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to the border. By contrast, the acting chief of ICE, Tom Homan, was one of the most outspoken immigration hardliners and backers of the president’s stances in the administration before he retired last week.

Third, fudging what exactly ICE does is useful in Trump’s partisan battles with Democrats. Trump tweeted on Sunday, for example, that “The Liberal Left, also known as the Democrats, want to get rid of ICE, who do a fantastic job, and want Open Borders. Crime would be rampant and uncontrollable!” There is, in fact, a faction among Democrats that is advocating for ICE abolition, but it’s hardly the whole party. The president is also conflating ICE’s abolition with an open-borders policy, when most Democrats (though, again, not all) do not support open borders, and when it is CBP, not ICE, that bears primary responsibility for watching the borders. ICE’s mandate is deportation investigations mostly within the country. It was created from parts of several predecessor agencies in 2003, as part of a post-9/11 reorganization of the federal government.