Trump wants to use WWII authority for deportations. Japanese Americans want to stop him

The Alien Enemies Act was last used to incarcerate people of Japanese ancestry. President-elect Donald Trump said he’d use it to deport migrants.

By Olivia Cruz Mayeda, California Local News Fellow

Updated Jan 15, 2025 10:31 p.m. (SFChronicle.com)

Susan Hayase and Tom Izu inside the replica of a camp barrack at the Japanese American Museum of San Jose on Jan. 10, 2025. The couple want to remind people about the role that the Alien Enemies Act played in incarcerating Japanese people like their parents before President-elect Donald Trump follows up on a promise to reactivate it for his mass deportation effort.Yalonda M. James/The Chronicle

Susan Hayase and Tom Izu fell in love while fighting for Japanese American reparations.

“Tom was giving a speech, and he’s clutching the lectern and talking really fast,” Hayase recalled with a laugh. “So, when the translator was translating his remarks into Japanese, I took him aside and I said, slow down — and he didn’t.”

In 1980, Hayase and Izu were attending a community-organized pilgrimage to Tule Lake near the California-Oregon border, where the American government had incarcerated Japanese Americans during World War II. In addition to issuing Executive Order 9066 to incarcerate 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry — most of whom were American citizens — President Franklin D. Roosevelt invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to detain 17,000 Japanese, 11,000 German and 3,000 Italian foreign nationals, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a liberal policy institute in New York.

“My great uncle was picked up under the Alien Enemies Act,” Hayase said.

Izu’s family, meanwhile, burned family records and childhood photos to protect his great uncle from the same fate as Hayase’s.

At an October campaign rally, President-elect Donald Trump said he would use the same act to deport migrants.

“That it’s being resurrected like a zombie is really upsetting to a lot of Japanese Americans,” Hayase said. “We have to stop this.”

For more than 80 years, the Alien Enemies Act has lain dormant. Trump’s vow to revive it against mostly Latino immigrants is part of a larger plan to repurpose laws meant for times of war to advance his nationalist domestic agenda, said Katherine Ebright, an attorney who focuses on constitutional war powers at the Brennan Center for Justice.

“The Alien Enemies Act really could be a centerpiece of the mass deportation proposal,” Ebright said.

Meanwhile, Japanese Americans who have been organizing to prevent this very scenario fear that the public has forgotten the Act’s racist history.

Alien Enemies Act, explained

The Alien Enemies Act originally targeted white Europeans, not immigrants of color, said Hidetaka Hirota, a UC Berkeley professor of U.S. immigration law and policy.

Back in 1798, the U.S. was embroiled in diplomatic tension with France, a sort of “18th century Cold War” period, said Hirota. President John Adams was clashing with Vice President Thomas Jefferson, who had lost to Adams in the 1796 election but would beat him in 1800.

Adams was a Federalist who believed in a central government stronger than the states, while Jefferson wanted the opposite and had the support of French radicals and Irish immigrants. So in 1798, Adams and a Federalist-controlled Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which included the Alien Enemies Act, to limit immigration by his rival’s supporters.

“The whole purpose was to really silence the voices of Adams’ opponents,” Hirota said. “The law was intended to delay the immigration of Jefferson’s supporters and their political participation.”

Adams’ move — like Trump’s — was first and foremost a threat. Adams didn’t actually deport any Jeffersonians after he passed the acts, but their passage led some of his opponents to flee the country. (In the Bay Area, some “Dreamers,” the recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, are already considering self-deportation ahead of a second Trump presidency.)

Today, the Alien and Sedition Acts are taught in schools as a violation of civil liberties and an overreach by the federal government, said Ebright.

“Even in the 1790s, Congress was deeply divided on whether these laws were consistent with our constitutional system,” she said.

By 1802, most of the Alien and Sedition Acts expired or were repealed — except for the Alien Enemies Act, which allows the president to arrest, relocate and deport people from an enemy nation during wartime. The federal government used the Alien Enemies Act during three subsequent wars: the War of 1812 to limit where British people could live, during World War I to intern German and Austro-Hungarian nationals, and during WWII to detain Japanese, Italian and German immigrants.

But what Trump is proposing now, said Ebright, is unprecedented.

Wartime power during peacetime

The Alien Enemies Act is only valid during war — and it’s only ever been used during war. But Trump and the Republican Party have other plans, said Ebright.

“Attempted legal framing of migration as an invasion actually goes back to the 1990s,” she said. “Republican governors of states like New Jersey and Florida sued the Clinton administration, saying that the administration failed to meet its constitutional obligation to protect the states against ‘invasion.’”

The courts threw out their cases, said Ebright, but their framing of migration as invasion lives on. And it could tee up Trump’s invocation of a wartime act.

“He has to show an imminent threat to trigger the Alien Enemies Act, so he’s been very careful to use language like, ‘the cartel activities are a threat to this country,’” said Naoko Fujii, a retired attorney who’s part of the fight to repeal it.

In November, Trump said he would declare a national state of emergency and use the military to carry out mass deportations. “I will immediately designate the cartels as foreign terrorist organizations,” he said at a December 2024 press conference.

“The idea is that we can misappropriate this wartime authority to create a turbocharged detention and deportation regime that bypasses the conventional protections that Congress has enacted for immigrants,” Ebright said.

The Alien Enemies Act also doesn’t include a method of implementation and is “remarkably vague,” Hirota said. But that doesn’t mean Trump can’t create one.

“The worst-case scenario here is that Trump and the courts interpret this law to the extent that he could simply kidnap somebody on the street,” he said.

There’s a precedent for what Hirota described. In the 1950s, the Immigration Naturalization Service under President Dwight D. Eisenhower raided Mexican American communities and forcefully deported documented and undocumented immigrants alike — over 1 million people in total. The Trump administration doesn’t make a distinction between immigrants with or without documents either, Hirota contended.

“Trump is against immigration in general: legal immigration and illegal immigration,” he said. “The Muslim ban, for example, was an assault on legal immigration, so generally, he’s against the immigration of nonwhite non-Christians.”

The fight to repeal 

Back in 2010, when Barack Obama was president, Mike Honda, a South Bay congressman, feared what’s unfolding now. It was midmorning in his Washington, D.C., office when he called then-Attorney General Eric Holder to tell him about a bill he was introducing to repeal the Alien Enemies Act.

“We were both Democrats, people of color and attorneys,” Honda recalled. “I told him that this Alien Enemy Act is really dangerous.”

In 1942, the U.S. government had detained a 1-year-old Honda and his Japanese parents in horse stables at the Merced County fairgrounds and then incarcerated them at Amache, an incarceration camp in Colorado.

Holder told him that the president’s office wouldn’t support the bill, Honda, now 83, said.

“He said, ‘No, it’s not going to pass,” Honda remembered. “‘It’s not necessary because it only applies if we declare war against a country.’”

The bill didn’t make it to committee. 

By then, conservative lawmakers were already describing immigration as a kind of invasion, said Ebright.

Lawmakers like Honda and attorneys like Fujii — whose great-grandfather was detained under the Alien Enemies Act in 1941 — still advocate against the Act.

“It’s a relic from 1798 that has been used to discriminate against groups of people just based on their race or religion or nationality and offers no due process to these groups,” said Fujii, a member of the San Jose chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League.

In 2020, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, with support from a retired Honda, introduced the Neighbors Not Enemies Act to repeal the Alien Enemies Act and reintroduced the bill in 2021, which was sponsored by Human Rights Watch, the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, and the Japanese American Citizens League. The bill has yet to be put up for a vote and is unlikely to pass, said Ebright.

“One real challenge for the bill is that it currently does not have bipartisan sponsorship,” she said. “And the president-elect promising to use this law makes it much more challenging to have it moved now in a Republican-controlled Congress.”

How Trump will or won’t follow through on his campaign promise is unclear. For Izu and Hayase, whose parents were also incarcerated during the war, Japanese Americans have a role to play in protecting the people Trump is targeting.

At the Japanese American Museum of San Jose, Izu and Hayase will contribute to an exhibit about the Japanese American movement for reparations they were a part of, known as the Redress Movement.

“This forgotten chapter of Japanese American history relates to this Alien Enemies Act,” Hayase, 68, said. “We’re worried that a lot of people don’t understand the tie between what’s happening now to other immigrants and what happened to Japanese Americans.”

“It seems like our experience has been made abstract,” Izu, 66, said. “Meaning, ‘oh yeah, the camps were wrong and we should be vigilant so that it doesn’t happen again,’ but what does that really look like?”

Izu and Hayase are still looking for answers as they organize immigrants rights trainings about what to do if Immigrations and Customs Enforcement comes knocking.

For Hirota, the same history that’s steeped in racism also holds some answers.

“Something that is often forgotten is that during the Reagan administration, a lot of immigrants were legalized,” he said. “So it could be done, but the reason why it’s not happening now is simply a lack of political will.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the year Thomas Jefferson lost the presidential race to John Adams. It was 1796. 

Reach Olivia Cruz Mayeda: olivia.cruzmayeda@sfchronicle.com

Jan 14, 2025|Updated Jan 15, 2025 10:31 p.m.

Olivia Cruz Mayeda

CALIFORNIA LOCAL NEWS FELLOW

Olivia Cruz Mayeda is a California Local News Fellow covering Asian American communities for the Chronicle. Before joining the Chronicle, Cruz Mayeda was an arts and culture reporter at KQED, where she wrote, directed and produced the six-episode docu-series “Deep Down.” She has a bachelor’s degree in history from Brown University and is a fifth-generation resident of the Bay Area.

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