The White House official website and President Donald Trump appeared to contradict each other on Friday over the signing of the Alien Enemies Act, which the president invoked as justification for the rapid deportation of members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.
On March 14, the official White House website noted the presidential action of Trump invoking the Alien Enemies Act originally signed by President John Adams in 1798.
“We want to get criminals out of our country. Number one, I don’t know when it was signed ’cause I didn’t sign it. Other people handled it. But [Secretary of State] Marco Rubio’s done a great job, and he wanted them out, and we go along with that. We want to get criminals out of our country,” Trump told reporters this week.
The White House appeared to backtrack, saying the president wasn’t referring to the invocation, but the original act signed by Adams.
“President Trump was obviously referring to the original Alien Enemies Act that was signed back in 1798,” White House communications director Steven Cheung said in a statement. “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.”
The president’s remarks came after a reporter asked the president to respond to U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg’s saying the invocation was signed “in the dark of night” and that illegal immigrants were then haphazardly loaded onto transport aircraft.
Boasberg called the actions of the Trump White House “incredibly troubling and problematic,” adding the administration engaged in “an unprecedented and expanded use of an act that has been used … in the War of 1812, World War I, and World War II, when there was no question there was a declaration of war and who the enemy was.”
Trump also appeared to be passing the buck to Rubio without provocation.
“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.
Boasberg vowed during a Friday hearing to persue the unprecedented case and said he would seek out the guilty parties and the proper punishment.
“The government’s not being terribly cooperative at this point, but I will get to the bottom of whether they violated my order and who ordered this and what’s the consequence,” he said.
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