Left-winger Steve Lopez has built a cozy career at the Los Angeles Times by playing the sympathy card, ad nauseum.

These days, his natural favorite topic is illegal aliens. He boldly argues that some laws should be obeyed, others flaunted, especially for illegals.

The subject of yesterday’s essay, family man Mario Vargas, shattered a law Mr. Lopez does not care about. No one is perfect, the essayist contended. Give him yet another chance because he is raising a handsome young family.

Oh, he has wandered off the path during his 17 years in America. In mid-family raising four years ago in Tennessee, he was sent to jail for a few months for drunken driving while his six children languished. Mistakes happen.

Otherwise, according to Mr. Lopez, he has been a model illegal.

Marshalling his favorite weapon, cynicism, Mr. Lopez merely used the Vargas family as a tearjerking tool to repeatedly club President Trump, his piñata of choice.

Since Mr. Trump was elected, Mr. Lopez has galloped up and down Los Angeles boulevards, screaming hysterically, as he was told to do, condemning Mr. Trump and lionizing illegals for punching in the nose laws Mr. Lopez finds annoying.

Twisting information as he and his fellow far lefties routinely do, Mr. Lopez reasons that illegal aliens who sneaked into our country 10, 20, 30 years ago truly are jolly good fellows. They are raising magazine-cover families. They go to church. They pay their taxes and their bills. They are medal-worthy.

Unsurprisingly, President Trump is the lone gremlin in Mr. Lopez’s endless round of fairy tales about immigrant lawbreakers.

Repeat after me, he chants: Illegals are wonderful. President Trump is mean-spirited.

In Sunday’s teary-eyed essay, Mr. Lopez plays every string on an illegal violin.

He tells the heart-tugging tale of Mr. Vargas’s daughter who trooped to Rome as a 10-year-old to plead with Pope Francis to help save her father and others from deportation. That will heat up the iciest heart.

The journalist uses Mr. Vargas’s attorney, one Alex Galvez, and Archbishop Jose Gomez as convenient weapons to destroy Mr. Trump – for political reasons – for following the law.

By the end, you believe that Mr. Lopez is far more committed to hammering Mr. Trump for following the law than helping the Vargas family.