Democratic Rep. Jim Himes (Conn.) said he thinks the Trump administration is acting “with an unbelievable cocktail of incompetence and illegality.”
Himes, who is the ranking member on the House Committee on Intelligence, joined CBS News’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday, where host Margaret Brennan asked him about the Trump administration’s deportation flights of alleged Venezuelan gang members and the differing messages about the legality of Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to do so.
“What people worry about is that this administration acts with a unbelievable kind of cocktail of incompetence and illegality,” Himes said of the deportation and the Department of Government Efficiency.
“When you fire all of the people at the Department of Energy who look after our nuclear weapons and then say ‘oopsie, we need to hire you back,’ that’s incompetence,” he continued.
Brennan asked Himes about the deportations of the alleged Tren de Aragua members and Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act.
The 18th-century wartime law allows the government to deport people who are deemed foreign adversaries in times of war. Officials have noted that the U.S. is not in a war with Venezuela, but national security adviser Mike Waltz suggested the gang was affiliated with the Venezuelan government.
“I’m not a lawyer, but I can read the first paragraph of the Aliens Enemy Act, which says very clearly that the authority that this administration claims is dependent on a declaration of war, not on acting as a proxy,” Himes said. “So, Mike distorted the law.”
Himes and Brennan highlighted a recent New York Times article that said the intelligence community does not believe the gang is linked to the Venezuelan government.