President Donald Trump’s assertion that a gang is committing crimes in the United States at the direction of Venezuela’s government was critical to his invocation of a wartime law last week to summarily deport people whom officials suspected of belonging to that group.

But American intelligence agencies circulated findings last month that stand starkly at odds with Trump’s claims, according to officials familiar with the matter. The document, dated Feb. 26, summarized the shared judgment of the nation’s spy agencies that the gang was not controlled by the Venezuelan government.

The disclosure calls into question the credibility of Trump’s basis for invoking a rarely used wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, to transfer a group of Venezuelans to a high-security prison in El Salvador last weekend, with no due process.

The intelligence community assessment concluded that the gang, Tren de Aragua, is not directed by Venezuela’s government or committing crimes in the United States on its orders, according to the officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

Analysts put that conclusion at a “moderate” confidence level, the officials said, because of a limited volume of available reporting about the gang. Most of the intelligence community, including the CIA and the National Security Agency, agreed with that assessment.

Only one agency, the FBI, partly dissented. It maintained the gang has a connection to the administration of Venezuela’s authoritarian president, Nicolás Maduro, based on information the other agencies did not find credible.

“Multiple intelligence assessments are prepared on issues for a variety of reasons,” the White House said in a statement. “The president was well within his legal and constitutional authority to invoke the Alien Enemies Act to expel illegal foreign terrorists from our country.”

A spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment.

Trump’s extraordinary use of wartime powers to advance his immigration crackdown has edged the administration closer to a constitutional clash with the judiciary. A judge in Washington is considering whether the administration violated his order blocking, for now, the expulsion of migrants under the law. The Justice Department denounced the order as infringing on Trump’s national security powers and asked an appeals court to overturn it.

The Alien Enemies Act empowers the executive branch to summarily removal foreign citizens whose government is in a declared war with the United States or is otherwise invading or engaged in a “predatory incursion” into American territory. The government last used the law in the internment and repatriation of Japanese, Italian and German citizens during and after World War II.

On its face, the law appears to require not just an invasion or incursion, but a link to the actions of a foreign government.

In his proclamation, Trump effectively summoned such a link into legal existence by saying that he had determined that Tren de Aragua was a proxy for the Venezuelan government and committing crimes in the United States at its direction because Maduro sought to destabilize the country.

“I make these findings using the full extent of my authority to conduct the nation’s foreign affairs under the Constitution,” Trump said.

But Trump’s key factual assertions contradicted the earlier intelligence assessment, the officials said. It concluded that the gang is not acting at the direction of the Maduro administration and that the two are instead hostile to each other, citing incidents in which Venezuelan security forces exchanged gunfire with gang members.

The assessment, according to one official, also portrayed the gang as lacking the resources and being too disorganized — with little in the way of any centralized command-and-control — to be able to carry out any government orders. And, the official said, the assessment says that while a handful of corrupt Venezuelan officials have ties to gang members, that does not amount to the gang being under the sway of the government as a whole.