WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump on Friday denied signing a proclamation invoking a 200-year-old law to deport alleged Venezuelan gang members who were sent to prison in El Salvador. His downplaying of his role in the affair came just hours after a federal judge called Trump’s use of the law “incredibly troublesome.”

Last weekend Trump invoked the rare wartime Alien Enemies Act to deport 238 men his administration alleged were members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua and send them to a maximum security prison in El Salvador. In a statement at the time, the White House press secretary wrote that Trump “signed a Proclamation Invoking the Alien Enemies Act” and the document additionally appears in the Federal Register with Trump’s signature on it.

But on Friday, Trump suggested his secretary of state had more to do with the matter, telling reporters: “I don’t know when it was signed because I didn’t sign it. Other people handled it.”

“Marco Rubio has done a great job and he wanted them out and we go along with that,” Trump said.

Earlier in the day a federal judge said that Trump’s use of the little-known law to deport the alleged gang members was “incredibly troublesome.”

At a hearing on Friday, James Boasberg, the chief judge of the US District Court in Washington, questioned the legality of using the 1798 Alien Enemies Act (AEA) to summarily send the Venezuelan migrants to the prison in El Salvador. “The policy ramifications of this are incredibly troublesome and problematic and concerning,” Boasberg said.

He noted that the only previous uses of the AEA were “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.”

Last weekend Boasberg issued an emergency order against deportation of the Venezuelans and said two flights already in the air needed to turn around. The Justice Department has claimed the planes were in international airspace when the judge issued his written order directing them to return and his jurisdiction no longer applied.

Lawyers and relatives of Venezuelans flown from the United States to a notorious jail in El Salvador believe the men were wrongly labeled gang members and terrorists because of their tattoos. Jhon Chacin, a professional tattoo artist, has images of “a flower, a watch, an owl, skulls” and family members’ names etched onto his skin.

Last October, the 35-year-old was arrested at the Mexican border for entering the United States illegally. Then last weekend, after not hearing from him for several days, shocked family members spotted him in a video of shaved and chained prisoners at a maximum security prison in El Salvador.

He was one of 238 men declared as a member of Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua—a terrorist group under US law—and deported by US President Donald Trump. “He doesn’t have a criminal record, he’d never been arrested,” Chacin’s sister Yuliana, who lives in Texas, told AFP.

She is convinced her brother was designated a gang member because of his body art. At the US detention center, before being deported, “ICE (immigration) agents told him he belonged to a criminal gang because he had a lot of tattoos.”

In the western Venezuelan city of Maracaibo, family members of several other deportees denied their loved ones were criminals. Twenty-three-year-old Edwuar Hernandez Herrera, known to family and friends as Edward, left Venezuela in 2023.

He made a fraught journey across the jungle-filled Darien Gap before reaching the United States, where he was detained. He has four tattoos—his mother and daughter’s names, an owl on his forearm and ears of corn on his chest, according to his mother Yarelis Herrera.

“These tattoos do not make him a criminal,” she told AFP. Herrera’s friend Ringo Rincon, 39, has nine tattoos, including a watch showing the times his son and daughters were born, said his wife Roslyany Camano.—AFP