CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig said Friday that it is a “big problem” if Donald Trump did not sign the proclamation invoking a controversial 18th century act that allowed his administration to speed up the deportation of Venezuelan migrants allegedly linked to gang activity.
Trump told reporters on Friday that he “did not know when it was signed because 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,” he continued. “And we go along with that. We want to get criminals out of our country.”
The White House later tried to clean up Trump’s comments, saying in a statement that he was “obviously referring to the original Alien Enemies Act that was signed back in 1798.”
Honig was not buying it.
“Was he telling us that, ‘I’m not John Adams, the guy who signed it back in 1798?’… The obvious thing he was saying here is, ‘I did not sign this proclamation that was used last week to deport these aliens.’ If that’s true, if Donald Trump did not actually sign that proclamation, it’s a big problem because the law specifically requires a proclamation by the president,” Honig said on CNN’s The Source.
“The president has to make a public proclamation of the event. So, if he was telling the truth, if in fact, he did not sign this thing, everything that followed – the deportation of these individuals – was all illegal, was all null and void,” he added. “That’s why they’re trying to walk it back with this ridiculous attempt to walk the tightrope.”
Despite Trump’s claim that he did not sign the proclamation, the document has his signature, according to a copy filed in the Federal Register.
Trump’s attempt to distance himself from the proclamation comes as the administration is locked in an ongoing court battle over whether the recent deportation flights are legal under the 18th century law and whether the administration knowingly defied U.S. District Judge James Boasberg order to turn around the flights to U.S.
“The policy ramifications of this are incredibly troublesome and problematic and concerning, and I agree it’s 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,” Boasberg said at a hearing on Friday, according to the Washington Post.
Honig said Boasberg was right to express skepticism about the Trump administration’s use of the law.
“First of all, there has to be an invasion, and it has to be by a foreign government,” Honig said. “And Donald Trump, if you look at the proclamation, which maybe he did or didn’t sign, tries to sort of put together a very stretched argument that, ‘Yes, this was an invasion, yes, it was somehow tied with the Government of Venezuela.’”
Honig argued that the Trump administration could have deported the alleged criminals under normal statutes without invoking the Alien Enemies Act.
