CNN
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President Donald Trump said on Friday for the first time that he dismissed his involvement in summoning the alien enemy law of 1798 to banish Venezuelan immigrants, and that even if he was standing in the move of his administration, he would not sign the declaration.
“I don’t know when it was signed, because when it didn’t sign,” Trump told reporters before leaving the White House on Friday evening.
The president made his comment on Friday when asked to respond to Judge James Boasberg’s concerns in court.
“We want criminals to be number one from our country. We didn’t sign them, so we don’t know when they were signed,” Trump said. “The others handled it, but (Secretary of State) Marco Rubio has done a great job and he wanted them, so we’ll go with it. We want to drive criminals out of our country.”
The declaration evoking the alien enemy laws appears in the federal register with Trump’s signature at the bottom.
Hours after the president made a comment Friday, the White House claimed it had not spoken about whether Trump had signed the document last week.
“President Trump clearly mentioned the original alien enemy law, signed in 1798,” a White House statement said. “The recent executive order was personally signed by invoking the alien enemy laws that designated Tren de Aragua as a foreign terrorist organization in order to arrest and deport these violent criminals.”
But Trump’s claim that “other people have dealt with it” and his specific quote from Rubio are at odds with that White House statement.
Trump called out Rubio’s name without urging him from a reporter. Later, when he was asked hypothetical questions about whether he would send another deportation flight to El Salvador tonight in an ongoing lawsuit, Trump said it was up to Rubio.
“I’m not really involved in it, so I’ll say the Secretary of State will get it to be handled, but the bad people killers, rapists, drug dealers, all the concepts are really bad people from our country. I ran with it.
At a hearing earlier Friday, Boasberg vowed to investigate whether Trump administration officials violated an order that temporarily shut down the use of alien enemies for deportation by refusing to run two flights last weekend.
“We’ll get to the bottom of whether they violated my orders – who will order this and what the outcome will be,” Boasberg said near the end of an hourly hearing on whether he should lift the pair of orders he issued last Saturday.
Former President Barack Obama appointee Boasberg was furious about how the Justice Department handled the rapidly moving lawsuit, and it appeared to have held a hearing torn to the tone the administration took in some court applications.
He told the DOJ Attorney General that Drew had used a language that the government had “unseen from the US” that had pushed various legal debates ahead of him earlier this week.
Many of Friday’s hearings focused on discussions from the Department of Justice over why Boasberg would lift the order to stop it. For now, Trump has used 18th century law to expel migrants who accused the United States of partnering with Venezuelan gangster Tren de Lagua. The administration argues that Boasberg has surpassed his authority in blocking rescue as he says federal courts cannot reaffirm Trump’s use of law.
This story has been updated with additional details.
Devan Cole from CNN contributed to this report.
