One of the problems with making a series of brazen and hyperbolic claims is that it can be hard to keep everyone on your team on the same page.
And few Trump administration claims have been as brazen as the idea that the Venezuelan government has engineered an invasion of gang members into the United States. This claim forms the basis of the administration’s controversial efforts to rapidly deport a bunch of people it claimed were members of the gang Tren de Aragua – without due process.
But one of the central figures responsible for warding off such invasions apparently didn’t get the memo.
At a Senate hearing Wednesday, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman retired Lt. Gen. Dan Caine acknowledged that the United States isn’t currently facing such a threat.
“I think at this point in time, I don’t see any foreign state-sponsored folks invading,” Caine said in response to Democratic questioning.
This might sound like common sense; of course the United States isn’t currently under invasion by a foreign government. You’d probably have heard something about that on the news.
But the administration has said – repeatedly and in court – that it has been.
When Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act to rapidly deport migrants without due process, that law required such a foreign “invasion” or “predatory incursion” to make his move legal. And Trump said that’s what was happening.
“The result is a hybrid criminal state that is perpetrating an invasion of and predatory incursion into the United States, and which poses a substantial danger to the United States,” reads the proclamation from Trump.
It added that Tren de Aragua’s actions came “both directly and at the direction, clandestine or otherwise, of the Maduro regime in Venezuela.”
So the White House said Tren de Aragua was acting in concert with the Maduro regime to invade; Caine now says “state-sponsored folks” aren’t invading.
Some flagged Caine’s comment as undermining Trump’s claims of a foreign “invasion” in Los Angeles. Trump has regularly applied that word to undocumented migrants.
But the inconsistency is arguably more significant when it comes to Trump’s claims about the Venezuelan migrants.
Perhaps the administration would argue that Trump has halted the invasion and it is no longer happening; Caine was speaking in the present tense.
Caine did go on to cite others who might have different views.
“But I’ll be mindful of the fact that there has been some border issues throughout time, and defer to DHS who handles the border along the nation’s contiguous outline,” he said.
But if an invasion had been happening recently, it seems weird not to mention that. And if the invasion is over, that would seem to undercut the need to keep trying to use the Alien Enemies Act.
The Department of Homeland Security is certainly not in the camp of no invasion. On Wednesday, DHS posted on Facebook an image with Uncle Sam that reads: “Report all foreign invaders” with a phone number for ICE.
When asked about the image and whether the use of the term “foreign invaders” had been used previously, DHS pointed CNN to a number of posts from White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller using terms like “invade” or “invaders” when referring to undocumented immigrants.
Plenty of Trump administration figures have gone to bat for this claim.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said soon after Trump’s proclamation that Tren de Aragua gang members “have been sent here by the hostile Maduro regime in Venezuela.”
Then-national security adviser Michael Waltz claimed Maduro was emptying his prisons “in a proxy manner to influence and attack the United States.”
We soon learned that the intelligence community had concluded Venezuela had not directed the gang. But Secretary of State Marco Rubio stood by Trump’s claim.
“Yes, that’s their assessment,” Rubio said last month about the intelligence community. “They’re wrong.”
Trump administration border czar Tom Homan has said the gang was an “arm of the Maduro regime,” and that Maduro’s regime was “involved with sending thousands of Venezuelans to this country to unsettle it.”
The question of Venezuela’s purported involvement actually hasn’t been dealt with much by the courts. A series of judges have moved to block the administration’s Alien Enemies Act gambit, but they’ve generally ruled that way because of the lack of an “invasion” or “predatory incursion” – without delving much into the more complex issue of whether such a thing might somehow have ties to Maduro’s government.
One of the judges to rule in that fashion was a Trump appointee, US District Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr.
So the intelligence community and a bunch of judges – including a Trump-appointed one – have rebutted the claim the underlies this historic effort to set aside due process.
And now, the man Trump installed as his top general seems to have undercut it too.
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