(Bloomberg) —White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said the U.S. military under President Donald Trump would never target any U.S. citizen, including those suspected of terrorism on foreign soil.

“No American citizen will ever be targeted,” Spicer told reporters on Tuesday at the White House, responding to a question about whether the Trump administration would consider striking U.S.-born suspected terrorists abroad.

The remark represented a departure from the policy of former President Barack Obama, who obtained a legal memo justifying a 2011 strike that killed U.S. citizen and accused al-Qaeda strategist Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen. The Obama administration said it was legal to target and kill a U.S. citizen if the person represented an active threat to the U.S. homeland.

Spicer’s declaration indicating that the U.S. would take that option off the table came after NBC News reported that Awlaki’s 8-year-old daughter, an American citizen, was killed by U.S. troops in a counterterrorism raid earlier this month in Yemen. It was the first such raid since Trump became commander-in-chief.

Spicer refused to confirm the details of the operation, beyond saying that it yielded important information and resulted in the deaths of more than a dozen suspected al-Qaeda operatives and one U.S. service member. Trump called the family of the fallen soldier to express his condolences, Spicer said Monday.

During the campaign, Trump said that he would take a more aggressive approach to combating terrorists than Obama did. He has said the U.S. should reconsider interrogation techniques banned by Obama as torture. And he said in the campaign that his counterterrorism strategy would include killing the family members of suspected terrorists.

“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,” he said on Fox News on Dec. 2, 2015.

Spicer and other White House spokesmen did not immediately respond to requests for clarification.