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Immediately after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt proclaimed an "invasion" and invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. Under that law, the Roosevelt administration held more than 31,000 non–U.
S. citizens of Japanese, German, and Italian descent in internment camps over the course of World War II. The great majority of them were detained as "dangerous" enemy aliens, a designation made by the government based primarily on their citizenship or place of birth and without anything approaching due process of law.
Bettmann / Getty Today, we are seeing alarming echoes of this history. Deported under the same statute, a group of 137 Venezuelan immigrants is being held indefinitely in a Salvadoran prison notorious for human-rights abuses. Although the Trump administration claims that they are members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang, they have had no hearing to test that claim.
The government has conceded in court filings that "many" of those removed under the Alien Enemies Act "have no criminal record in the United States"; some appear to have been targeted at least in part for having common tattoos, such as roses or crowns. As detailed in a 2024 report that we produced for the Brennan Center for Justice, Roosevelt's internment policy came to be seen as a stain on the nation's honor, and the Alien Enemies Act itself fell into disrepute. By dusting off this disgraced law and using it to deny people their rights, President Donald Trump seeks to erase the moral and legal progress of eight decades.
And unlike Roosevelt, who invoked the law after what was then the deadliest attack on the United States in history, Trump is abusing a wartime power during peacetime. He may not succeed. The Supreme Court's dramatic intervention last weekend, in which seven justices blocked additional deportations pending further review by the courts, was the culmination of a series of rulings against the administration.
The ultimate...
Katherine Yon Ebright , Elizabeth Goitein.
