President Donald Trump on Friday downplayed his involvement in invoking the
Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport Venezuelan migrants, saying for the first time that he hadn’t signed the proclamation, even as he stood by his administration’s move.
“I don’t know when it was signed, because I didn’t sign it,” Trump told reporters before leaving the White House on Friday evening.
The president made his comments when asked to respond to
Judge James Boasberg’s concerns in court on Friday that the proclamation was “signed in the dark” of night and that migrants were hurried onto planes.
“We want to get criminals out of our country, number one, and I don’t know when it was signed, because I didn’t sign it,” Trump said. “Other people handled it, but (Secretary of State) Marco Rubio has done a great job and he wanted them out and we go along with that. We want to get criminals out of our country.”
The proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act appears in the
Federal Register with Trump’s signature at the bottom.
Hours after the president made his comments on Friday, the White House claimed that Trump was not talking about whether he signed the document last week.
“President Trump was obviously referring to the original Alien Enemies Act that was signed back in 1798,” a White House statement said. “The recent Executive Order was personally signed by President Trump invoking the Alien Enemies Act that designated Tren de Aragua as a Foreign Terrorist Organization in order to apprehend and deport these heinous criminals.”
Yet Trump’s assertion that “other people handled it,” and his specific citation of Rubio, is at odds with that White House statement.
Trump raised Rubio’s name without prompting from reporters. When he was then asked a hypothetical question about whether he would send another deportation flight to El Salvador tonight amid the ongoing litigation, Trump said it would be up to Rubio.
“I would say that I’d have the Secretary of State handle it, because I’m not really involved in that, but the concept of getting bad people murderers, rapists, drug dealers, all of the, these are really some bad people out of our country. I ran on that. I won on that,” Trump said.
At a hearing earlier Friday, Boasberg vowed to find out whether officials in the Trump administration violated his orders temporarily blocking the use of the Alien Enemies Act for deportations by refusing to turn two flights around last weekend.
“I will get to the bottom of whether they violated my order – who ordered this and what the consequences will be,” Boasberg said near the end of the hourlong hearing over whether he should lift the pair of orders he issued last Saturday.
Boasberg, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, appeared incensed over how the Justice Department has handled the fast-moving case, opening the hearing by tearing into the tone the administration had taken in some of its court filings.
He told DOJ attorney Drew Ensign that the government had used “intemperate and disrespectful” language that he’s “never seen from the United States” as it pushed various legal arguments before him earlier this week, including the suggestion his orders from the bench last Saturday carried less weight than a written order that was issued shortly after those proceedings.
Much of Friday’s hearing focused on arguments from the Justice Department for why Boasberg should lift his orders to stop, for now, Trump’s use of the 18th-century law to quickly deport some migrants whom the US has accused of being affiliated with the Venezuelan gang
Tren de Aragua. The administration is arguing that Boasberg exceeded his authority in blocking the removals because, they say, Trump’s use of the act is an unreviewable by federal courts.
This story has been updated with additional details.
