Updated\u00a0Jan 15, 2025 10:31 p.m. (SFChronicle.com)<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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<\/em><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Susan Hayase and Tom Izu fell in love while fighting for Japanese American reparations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cTom was giving a speech, and he\u2019s clutching the lectern and talking really fast,\u201d Hayase recalled with a laugh. \u201cSo, when the translator was translating his remarks into Japanese, I took him aside and I said, slow down \u2014 and he didn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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<\/a> to incarcerate 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry \u2014 most of whom were American citizens \u2014 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>, a liberal policy institute in New York.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cMy great uncle was picked up under the Alien Enemies Act,\u201d Hayase said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Izu\u2019s family, meanwhile, burned family records and childhood photos to protect his great uncle from the same fate as Hayase\u2019s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At an October campaign rally, President-elect Donald Trump said<\/a> he would use the same act to deport migrants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThat it\u2019s being resurrected like a zombie is really upsetting to a lot of Japanese Americans,\u201d Hayase said. \u201cWe have to stop this.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n For more than 80 years, the Alien Enemies Act has lain dormant. Trump\u2019s 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<\/a>, said Katherine Ebright, an attorney who focuses on constitutional war powers at the Brennan Center for Justice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe Alien Enemies Act really could be a centerpiece of the mass deportation proposal,\u201d Ebright said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Meanwhile, Japanese Americans who have been organizing to prevent this very scenario fear that the public has forgotten the Act\u2019s racist history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Back in 1798, the U.S. was embroiled in diplomatic tension with France, a sort of \u201c18th century Cold War\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s supporters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe whole purpose was to really silence the voices of Adams\u2019 opponents,\u201d Hirota said. \u201cThe law was intended to delay the immigration of Jefferson\u2019s supporters and their political participation.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Adams\u2019 move \u2014 like Trump\u2019s \u2014 was first and foremost a threat. Adams didn\u2019t 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 \u201cDreamers,\u201d the recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, are already considering self-deportation<\/a> ahead of a second Trump presidency.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cEven in the 1790s, Congress was deeply divided on whether these laws were consistent with our constitutional system,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By 1802, most of the Alien and Sedition Acts expired or were repealed \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But what Trump is proposing now, said Ebright, is unprecedented.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n The Alien Enemies Act is only valid during war \u2014 and it\u2019s only ever been used during war. But Trump and the Republican Party have other plans, said Ebright.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAttempted legal framing of migration as an invasion actually goes back to the 1990s,\u201d she said. \u201cRepublican 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 \u2018invasion.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The courts threw out their cases, said Ebright, but their framing of migration as invasion lives on. And it could tee up Trump\u2019s invocation of a wartime act.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHe has to show an imminent threat to trigger the Alien Enemies Act, so he\u2019s been very careful to use language like, \u2018the cartel activities are a threat to this country,\u2019\u201d said Naoko Fujii, a retired attorney who\u2019s part of the fight to repeal it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In November, Trump said<\/a> he would declare a national state of emergency and use the military to carry out mass deportations. \u201cI will immediately designate the cartels as foreign terrorist organizations,\u201d he said<\/a> at a December 2024 press conference.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe 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,\u201d Ebright said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Alien Enemies Act also doesn\u2019t include a method of implementation and is \u201cremarkably vague,\u201d Hirota said. But that doesn\u2019t mean Trump can\u2019t create one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe 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,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There\u2019s 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 \u2014 over 1 million people in total. The Trump administration doesn\u2019t make a distinction between immigrants with or without documents either, Hirota contended.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cTrump is against immigration in general: legal immigration and illegal immigration,\u201d he said. \u201cThe Muslim ban, for example, was an assault on legal immigration, so generally, he\u2019s against the immigration of nonwhite non-Christians.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Back in 2010, when Barack Obama was president, Mike Honda, a South Bay congressman, feared what\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe were both Democrats, people of color and attorneys,\u201d Honda recalled. \u201cI told him that this Alien Enemy Act is really dangerous.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Holder told him that the president\u2019s office wouldn\u2019t support the bill, Honda, now 83, said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHe said, \u2018No, it\u2019s not going to pass,\u201d Honda remembered. \u201c\u2018It\u2019s not necessary because it only applies if we declare war against a country.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The bill didn\u2019t make it to committee. <\/p>\n\n\n\n By then, conservative lawmakers were already describing immigration as a kind of invasion, said Ebright.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lawmakers like Honda and attorneys like Fujii \u2014 whose great-grandfather was detained under the Alien Enemies Act in 1941 \u2014 still advocate against the Act.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt\u2019s 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,\u201d said Fujii, a member of the San Jose chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n In 2020, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, with support from a retired Honda, introduced the Neighbors Not Enemies Act<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cOne real challenge for the bill is that it currently does not have bipartisan sponsorship,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd the president-elect promising to use this law makes it much more challenging to have it moved now in a Republican-controlled Congress.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n How Trump will or won\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n \u201cThis forgotten chapter of Japanese American history relates to this Alien Enemies Act,\u201d Hayase, 68, said. \u201cWe\u2019re worried that a lot of people don\u2019t understand the tie between what\u2019s happening now to other immigrants and what happened to Japanese Americans.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt seems like our experience has been made abstract,\u201d Izu, 66, said. \u201cMeaning, \u2018oh yeah, the camps were wrong and we should be vigilant so that it doesn\u2019t happen again,\u2019 but what does that really look like?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For Hirota, the same history that\u2019s steeped in racism also holds some answers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cSomething that is often forgotten is that during the Reagan administration, a lot of immigrants were legalized,\u201d he said. \u201cSo it could be done, but the reason why it\u2019s not happening now is simply a lack of political will.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Correction:<\/strong> An earlier version of this story misstated the year Thomas Jefferson lost the presidential race to John Adams. It was 1796. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Reach Olivia Cruz Mayeda: olivia.cruzmayeda@sfchronicle.com<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Jan 14, 2025|Updated Jan 15, 2025 10:31 p.m.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n Olivia Cruz Mayeda<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n CALIFORNIA LOCAL NEWS FELLOW<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u201cDeep Down.\u201d She has a bachelor\u2019s degree in history from Brown University and is a fifth-generation resident of the Bay Area.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Alien Enemies Act was last used to incarcerate people of Japanese ancestry. President-elect Donald Trump said he\u2019d use it to deport migrants. By\u00a0Olivia Cruz Mayeda, California Local News Fellow Updated\u00a0Jan 15, 2025 10:31 p.m. (SFChronicle.com) Susan Hayase and Tom Izu inside the replica of a camp barrack at the Japanese… Continue reading ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/image-61.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nAlien Enemies Act, explained<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Wartime power during peacetime<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The fight to repeal <\/h2>\n\n\n\n