President Donald Trump's top general undercut his administration's legal argument for its sweeping anti-immigration agenda.
The administration has justified its mass deportations are necessary and legal because the Venezuelan government has engineered an invasion of the U.S. by gang members, but Trump's chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff acknowledged during a Senate hearing that the claim simply wasn't accurate, reported CNN.
'One of the central figures responsible for warding off such invasions apparently didn’t get the memo," CNN wrote.
The statement followed retired Lieutenant General Dan Caine's statement at a Senate hearing Wednesday that, “I think at this point in time, I don’t see any foreign state-sponsored folks invading."
Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act to deport migrants without due process, arguing that a "hybrid criminal state" was conducting a "predatory incursion" by the Tren de Aragua gang onto U.S. territory. But Caine's testimony shows he does not believe that to be true.
"Some flagged Caine’s comment as undermining Trump’s claims of a foreign 'invasion' in Los Angeles," CNN's Aaron Blake wrote. "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."
Caine did allow that others in the administration might see things differently.
"I’ll be mindful of the fact that there has been some border issues throughout time," Caine said, "and defer to DHS who handles the border along the nation’s contiguous outline."
Top Trump officials – including secretary of state Marco Rubio, then-national security adviser Mike Waltz and border czar Tom Homan – have asserted that rapid mass deportations were necessary because Venezuela's government was engineering a gang invasion, but Caine's comments suggest otherwise.
"The intelligence community and a bunch of judges – including a Trump-appointed one – have rebutted the claim that underlies this historic effort to set aside due process," Blake wrote. "And now, the man Trump installed as his top general seems to have undercut it too."
