It was just a few sentences in a meandering, hourlong presidential speech on a Friday afternoon.

 

Along with talk about falling egg prices and a vow to expel “corrupt forces” from the U.S. government, President Donald Trump noted that hundreds of members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua had been arrested.

 

“You’ll be reading a lot of stories tomorrow about what we’ve done with them,” he said at the Justice Department on March 14. “These are tough people and bad people and we’re getting them out of our country.”

 

“You’ll be very impressed,” he added.

 

Trump was previewing drama to come that would involve clandestine flights to another continent, a notorious prison, innocents among criminals and a dramatic confrontation between his assertions of presidential power and a federal judge who Trump said had overreached.

 

The president’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to justify deporting more than 130 Venezuelan men, some of them gang members and others who claim to have been in the United States legally and were seemingly expelled because of their ordinary tattoos, played out over a frenetic 24 hours