by XUEER LU MARCH 20, 2025 (MissionLocal.org)
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Days after President Trump used the the wartime Alien Enemies Act to deport some 200 Venezuelans to prisons in El Salvador — in defiance of a federal court order — Japanese-Americans and allies rallied in support of the deportees at the Japanese Cultural and Community Center, reminding attendees of the law’s history.
The act “led to the removal of Japanese immigrants who had been living here for decades,” said Satsuka Ina, who was born at the Tule Lake Segregation Center, an internment camp in Northern California, and remembers growing up around barbed wire and guard towers. That history, she and others said, was repeating itself.
In 1942, 125,000 people of Japanese ancestry were removed from their homes and incarcerated after President Franklin D. Roosevelt invoked the act due to the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
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Carl Takei, a criminal justice reform program manager at the legal aid and civil rights organization Asian Law Caucus, spoke of how his great grandfather heard a knock on his door from FBI agents shortly after Pearl Harbor. He was declared an alien enemy, and taken away.
“This is an effort to silence dissent and disappear our community members without any semblance of due process, without any hearings,and to pack them up and take them away to these faraway prisons,” Takei said, standing alongside seven speakers.
Ina, who experienced the internment firsthand, said the act caused the “removal of not just Japanese immigrants, but what the government called non-aliens, which are American citizens.”
On March 15, the Trump administration justified its invocation of the act by declaring the “invasion of the United States by Tren de Aragua,” a prison-born Venezuelan gang. The administration has claimed that the deportees were gang members, but lawyers for those deported have said that their clients were singled out for their tattoos and have gathered testimony from deportees denying gang affiliation.
Judge James E. Boasberg ruled on March 15 that the Trump administration cannot use the wartime Alien Enemies Act — a 1798 law — to deport people without a hearing, and in increasingly frustrated missives has asked administration attorneys why they did not comply with his orders to turn around the deportation flights.
Scholars of authoritarianism have warned that Trump’s dismissal of judicial rulings is driving the United States towards a crisis far faster than other 21st century autocracies. Until Feb. 1, many Venezuelans automatically qualified for “temporary protected status” because the political and environmental conditions in Venezuela are considered so dangerous.
“Everyone deserves their day in court. Everyone,” San Francisco Public Defender Mano Raju said at Thursday’s press conference.
Raju said some of the deportees have “pending civil court dates in order to obtain their immigration status. Deportees who are currently in the El Salvadoran prisons, he added, did not have the chance to present evidence. “When those fundamental due process rights are violated for the most vulnerable,” Raju said. “It’s not long between those before those rights are eroded for everyone else.”
Raju also called for a “massive, nationwide, aggressive, peaceful and nonviolent resistance” against the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act. “Today, as witnesses to these gross human rights violations, we will not be complicit,” Raju added. “We will not relent until those rights are restored.”
Similar actions have led to widespread resistance in the past. In 2017, when the Trump administration banned citizens of mostly Muslim countries from entering the United States for the next three months, and officials detained several legal permanent U.S. residents — or green card holders — who were traveling when the ban was announced, protests broke out at airports across the country and several detainees were released.
Annie Lee, who works at the advocacy groups Chinese for Affirmative Action and Stop AAPI Hate, said it is “simply unjust to take people from their homes and boot them out of the country.”
“Like Martin Luther King Jr. said, ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,’” Lee added. “Today they are coming after Venezuelans. Tomorrow they will come after other people.”
“This is not a Japantown problem or a Japanese problem,” said Dean Ito-Taylor, the executive director of the Asian Pacific Islander Legal Outreach. “This is an American problem.”
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XUEER LU
Xueer is a California Local News Fellow, working on data and covering housing. Xueer is a bilingual multimedia journalist fluent in Chinese and English and is passionate about data, graphics, and innovative ways of storytelling. Xueer graduated from UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism with a Master’s Degree in May 2023. She also loves cooking, photography, and scuba diving.More by Xueer Lu
