"Righteous for sinners" seems to be the immediate punishment to which the US president resorts when something goes wrong during his term.

This time, and due to the serious terrorist act carried out in lower Manhattan last Tuesday, Trump has blamed the "soft immigration policies" promoted by the Democratic caucus in Washington.

The blame was pointed directly at Senator Chuck Schumer, leader of the party in the Senate.

"The terrorist came to our country through what is called the 'Diversity Visa Lottery Program', a Chuck Schumer beauty. I want merit-based" the president wrote on Twitter.

Sayfullo Saipov, a 29-year-old Uzbek immigrant, allegedly entered the country seven years ago through the visa lottery program, as conservative media reported, but government officials have not yet confirmed this information.

For his part, and as reported by the New York Times, the Democratic Senator responded from the floor of the Senate with a statement in which he affirmed the importance of immigration to the United States.

“President Trump, instead of politicizing and dividing America, which he always seems to do at times of national tragedy, should be bringing us together and focusing on the real solution — antiterrorism funding — which he proposed cutting in his most recent budget”, Schumer said.

On March 16, the New York City Police Department had claimed that President Trump's budget "included government-level cuts that could undermine efforts to fight terrorism in the nation's largest city."

"Under the president's proposal, almost all of the federal funding of the NYPD would be eradicated," New York Police Commissioner James P. O'Neill said at the time. "This financing is absolutely vital. It is the backbone of our entire counter-terrorism apparatus."

But before paying attention to what logic dictates, the president has used a national tragedy to boost his legislative agenda.

In a statement along with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, Trump said he would be beginning the process of "terminating the diversity lottery program," CNN reported. "We are going to quickly as possible get rid of chain migration and move to a merit-based system”, he said.

The visa lottery program was created in 1990 through a bill that Senator Schumer promoted, and which was approved by bipartisan votes, and was signed by the then Republican President George Bush. This type of visa is administered by the Department of State and carried out under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), and makes available 50,000 permanent residence visas per year, aimed at the diversification of the immigrant population in the United States. The system selects applicants from countries with low immigration rates during the previous five years.

During 2013, efforts were made to stop the program - of which Schumer himself participated - to try to control immigration in the country, but were the Republicans in the House of Representatives who blocked the project.

The paradox of the president's remarks is not only that he uses a national crisis to boost his governmental agenda - something that spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders strongly criticized after the shooting in Las Vegas, when the voices were raised demanding gun control - just as it isn’t the fact that it confused the location of the country of origin of the New York attacker (the president claimed that we were "importing problems from Europe", when the attacker comes from Uzbekistan, in Central Asia); what is really ironic is that in the face of a tragedy that affects US citizenship, once again immigrants are the President’s scapegoats.