The White House is insisting the Trump administration did not violate a court order when it deported more than 200 immigrants to El Salvador over the weekend, even as a federal judge ordered the deportations to be temporarily stopped. “All of the planes that were subject to the written order of this judge departed U.S. soil, U.S. territory, before the judge’s written order,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the briefing. The Trump administration on Saturday transferred hundreds of immigrants to El Salvador using an 18th century wartime declaration - the Alien Enemies Act - to target what the administration said were Venezuelan gang members. "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. We are quite confident in that, and we are wholly confident that we are going to win this case in court." U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg issued an order Saturday temporarily blocking the deportations, but lawyers told him there were already two planes with immigrants in the air — one headed for El Salvador, the other for Honduras. Boasberg verbally ordered the planes be turned around, but they apparently were not and he did not include the directive in his written order. Leavitt said Monday there are questions about whether the judge’s verbal order “carries the same weight as a legal order, as a written order.” The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 has been used only three times in U.S. history. The law, invoked during the War of 1812 and World Wars I and II, requires a president to declare the United States is at war, giving him extraordinary powers to detain or remove foreigners who otherwise would have protections under immigration or criminal laws. It was last used to justify the detention of Japanese-American civilians during World War II. Venezuela’s government in a statement Sunday rejected the use of Trump’s declaration of the law, characterizing it as evocative of “the darkest episodes in human history, from slavery to the horror of the Nazi concentration camps.” Tren de Aragua originated in an infamously lawless prison in the central state of Aragua and accompanied an exodus of millions of Venezuelans, the overwhelming majority of whom were seeking better living conditions after their nation’s economy came undone during the past decade. Trump seized on the gang during his campaign to paint misleading pictures of communities that he contended were “taken over” by what were actually a handful of lawbreakers.