Trump Claims He Didn’t Sign Proclamation Invoking Alien Enemies Act
President Donald Trump pleaded ignorance on Friday over a document with his name on it that invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 and led to the deportation of hundreds of immigrants to El Salvador.
“I don’t know when it was signed because I didn’t sign it,” he told reporters, adding that “other people handled it.”
He proceeded to turn his attention to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, ”[He’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.”
His remarks arrive after U.S. District Judge James Boasberg — who ordered to block the flights to an El Salvadoran prison and has faced calls by Trump for his impeachment — referred to Trump’s use of the act as “incredibly troublesome,” noting that the proclamation was signed in the “signed in the dark” of the night.
The proclamation explicitly refers to Trump acting in his role as president prior to his signature at the bottom, per a copy of the document in the Federal Register.
The White House has used the past week to defend the flights, calling Boasberg a “Democrat activist” despite his history of ruling in the president’s favor.
Trump’s distancing from his proclamation comes less than a week after he baselessly claimed that his predecessor Joe Biden used an autopen, thus making his pardons “void.”
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Trump, who has admitted to using an autopen himself, pressed that the then-president “knew nothing” about the pardons he issued and “the people that did may have committed a crime.”
