A White House spokesperson clarified Tuesday evening that President Donald Trump has not abandoned Obama administration policy allowing the targeted killing of Americans without trial under certain circumstances.

“U.S. policy regarding the possible targeting of American citizens has not changed,” spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement reported by Time and Bloomberg.

Earlier in the day, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer told reporters during a press briefing that "no American citizen will ever be targeted” in a counterterrorism strike, an apparent policy change.

In 2010 the Justice Department developed a legal justification for killing a U.S. citizen living in Yemen who served as an al-Qaida propagandist. The target, Anwar al-Awlaki, died in a 2011 drone strike alongside a second American, Samir Khan.

Many civil liberties advocates consider the killing of al-Awlaki an extrajudicial execution that deprived him of his constitutional rights to a trial and due process. But the 2010 memo said he could be legally killed, as he posed "continued and imminent threat" and was part of a group against whom Congress had authorized military force.

Al-Awlaki is the only U.S. citizen the Obama administration acknowledged targeting for death in a counterterrorism operation.

Spicer’s Tuesday statement came during questioning about the death of al-Awlaki’s 8-year-old daughter Nawar on Sunday. Her grandfather said she was shot in the neck during the first U.S. ground raid in Yemen authorized by President Donald Trump.

Previously, Nawar’s brother Abdulrahman died in a drone strike less than a month after his father. Former Attorney General Eric Holder said in 2013 he was not targeted.

In 2015, Trump appeared to endorse the targeted killing of family members of terrorists, making Spicer’s comment a surprise. “The other thing with the terrorists is you have to take out their families, when you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families,” Trump said at the time.

Sanders added in her Tuesday evening statement that “the United States does not and will not deliberately target family members of terrorists.”