CNN
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President Donald Trump on Friday downplayed his involvement in invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1789 to deport Venezuelan migrants, saying for the first time that he hadn’t signed the proclamation, even as he stood by his administration’s move.
“I don’t know when it was signed, because I didn’t sign it,” Trump told reporters before leaving the White House on Friday evening.
The president made his comments when asked to respond to Judge James Boasberg’s criticism in court on Friday that the proclamation was “signed in the dark” of night.
“We want to get criminals out of our country, number one, and I don’t know when it was signed because I didn’t sign it,” Trump said. “Other people handled it, but (Secretary of State) Marco Rubio has 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 proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act appears in the Federal Register with Trump’s signature at the bottom.
Trump raised Rubio’s name without prompting from reporters. When he was then asked a hypothetical question about whether he would send another deportation flight to El Salvador tonight amid the ongoing litigation, Trump said it would be up to Rubio.
“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.
CNN has reached out to the White House for comment.
