The White House defended its decision to proceed with multiple deportation flights over the weekend after a federal judge ordered President Donald Trump to pause the flights while courts determine his legal footing.
Late last week, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act to speed the deportation proceedings for hundreds of illegal immigrants associated with the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. The move marked the first time the 18th-century law had been used since World War II.
Just days later, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg directed Trump and the administration to pause those deportation proceedings to consider the implications of Trump’s use of the law, which has traditionally been reserved for times when the United States is actively engaged in a war with a foreign nation.
Still, the administration decided not to comply with Boasberg’s order, directing two flights that had already departed to continue their previous schedules and deposit those migrants at a prison in El Salvador.
Though Boasberg mentioned in his verbal order that deportation flights that had already departed the United States should return to America, his written order did not, a point that White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt repeated on multiple occasions during Monday’s press briefing.
“All of the planes that were subject to the written order, the judge’s written order, took off before the order was entered in the courtroom on Saturday,” Leavitt told reporters.
“There’s actually questions about whether a verbal order carries the same weight, as a legal order — as a written order,” she stated later in the briefing. “Our lawyers are determined to ask and answer those questions.”
Leavitt also forcefully defended Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, in addition to the president’s overriding deportation agenda.
“This administration acted within the confines of the law, again, within the President’s constitutional authority and under the authority granted to him under the Alien Enemies Act,” she said. “We are quite confident in that, and we are wholly confident that we are going to win this case in court.”
Trump himself asserted to reporters on Sunday that the United States was, in fact, at war with illegal immigrants, Tren de Aragua in particular.
“They invaded our country, so this isn’t — in that sense, this is war,” Trump told reporters traveling with him Sunday night from Florida to Washington, D.C. “In many respects, it’s more dangerous than war because, you know, in war, they have uniforms. You know who you’re shooting at, you know who you’re going after.”
HOMAN: JUDGE WHO BLOCKED DEPORTATION FLIGHTS ‘DEFIES LOGIC’
“These were bad people,” Trump added of the two Saturday flights in particular. “That was a bad group of, as I say, ‘hombres.’”
Monday’s briefing can be seen in full below.
