The botched rollout of the Trump administration's first executive order banning travel from several majority Muslim nations resulted in federal agents violating court orders by telling airlines not to admit certain passengers, according to a Homeland Security watchdog.

The Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) inspector general informed lawmakers this week that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents violated at least two court orders in their zeal to enforce the new mandate and prevent specific passengers from the nations on the ban from boarding a plane.

“While CBP was compliant at U.S. ports of entry with travelers who had already arrived, CBP was very aggressive in preventing affected travelers from boarding aircraft bound for the United States, and took actions that, in our view, violated two separate court orders that enjoined them from this activity,” Inspector General John Roth wrote.

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Roth added that the problems were caused by the customs agency being caught "off guard" by the executive order, which Trump rolled out in January.

The order originally banned all travel to the U.S. by citizens of seven Muslim-majority nations. The agency, Roth said, was unable to get answers to "basic questions" about the order during its implementation.

“The leadership of CBP, the DHS entity primarily responsible for implementation of the order, had virtually no warning that the Executive Order (EO) was to be issued or the scope of the order, and was caught by surprise,’’ Roth said.

“During the early period of implementation of the order, neither CBP nor the department was sure of the answers to basic questions as to the scope of the order," he said.

According to Roth, the Trump administration is now seeking to hide its failures by engaging in a battle with the inspector general over whether large sections of the watchdog's report should be redacted prior to its public release.

In the letter to three Senate Democrats, Sens. Dick Durbin Richard (Dick) Joseph DurbinMcConnell focuses on confirming judicial nominees with COVID-19 talks stalled Senate Republicans signal openness to working with Biden Top GOP senator calls for Biden to release list of possible Supreme Court picks MORE (D-Ill.), Tammy Duckworth Ladda (Tammy) Tammy DuckworthMcConnell focuses on confirming judicial nominees with COVID-19 talks stalled Biden courts veterans amid fallout from Trump military controversies John Fogerty: 'Confounding' that Trump campaign played 'Fortunate Son' at rally MORE (D-Ill.) and Claire McCaskill Claire Conner McCaskillMomentum growing among Republicans for Supreme Court vote before Election Day Democratic-linked group runs ads in Kansas GOP Senate primary Trump mocked for low attendance at rally MORE (D-Mo.), Roth wrote that he had never encountered an agency trying to use this system to pursue such heavy redactions to a report.

Trump's original travel ban was blocked by a federal judge in February, who wrote that states "have met their burden of demonstrating that they face immediate and irreparable injury as a result of the signing and implementation of the executive order."

The administration responded to the block by unveiling a second and then a third version of the ban, the last of which is currently in effect.

In response to Roth's letter, Duckworth and Durbin issued a joint statement calling the Trump administration's attempts to redact parts of his report "unacceptable."

"It’s disappointing that the DHS Inspector General found that CBP violated two separate federal court orders during the chaotic implementation of this ill-conceived Executive Order, but it is frankly unacceptable that the Trump Administration now appears to be hiding that information not just from Congress, but from the public as well," the two senators said in the statement.

If the Trump administration successfully hides large sections of the report, they warn, there will be "repercussions in Congress.”