Donald Trump told reporters on Friday that he was not the one who invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act last week.
Before leaving Washington for another weekend of golf, Trump attempted to distance himself from the controversial act amid mounting legal questions.
“I don’t know when it was signed because I didn’t sign it,” Trump said in a clip highlighted by Mediaite. “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.”
The White House has released a statement saying Trump was “obviously” saying he is not John Adams who signed the original law in 1798.
“President Trump was obviously referring to the original Alien Enemies Act that was signed back in 1798,” the statement reads. “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.”
Last weekend, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ordered a halt to the effort to deport hundreds of immigrants allegedly affiliated with Venezuelan gangs after Trump invoked the controversial 18th century wartime law.
The Trump administration ignored the judge’s orders and went ahead with the deportation flights anyway. In court on Monday, one DOJ attorney argued that the verbal order was “not enforceable.”
At a hearing on Friday, Boasberg grilled a Justice Department attorney about whether the Trump administration knowingly defied his order to turn around deportation 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 Friday’s hearing, according to the Washington Post.
“Why was this proclamation essentially signed in the dark?” Boasberg added. “Then these people rushed onto planes. It seems to me the only reason to do that is if you know it’s a problem and you want to get them out of the country.”
In the days following the deportation flight, an official with ICE has acknowledge in a sworn declaration that “many” of the noncitizens deported under the Alien Enemies Act did not have criminal records in the United States despite Trump’s claim that they are violent criminals.
