Trump Invokes the Alien Enemies Act of 1798
What’s going on?
Hundreds of immigrants have been deported around the country after President Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 for the first time since World War II. Using a centuries-old wartime law to target alleged members of a Venezuelan gang (Tren De Aragua), the new administration continues to arrest, detain, and deport more and more people while the bourgeois media focuses on legal battles against the administration that will take MONTHS to resolve.
While the Federal appellate courts have done their utmost to put a pause to the enforcement of this law, it will still take many months and many different levels of courts before the Supreme Court can POTENTIALLY put an end to this. The Democrats continue to tiptoe around the actual issues of the Trump administrations’ bonapartist tendencies, while remaining a legal “opposition” party.
What is the Alien Enemies Act of 1798?
The Alien Enemies Act allows the president, in times of “declared war” or when the US government perceives a threat to the nation, to detain and deport citizens of an “alien” nation. The Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war, but the president has the executive power to utilize their discretion to invoke this act WITHOUT WAITING FOR CONGRESS’S APPROVAL.
When the Fifth Congress passed the law and the Wilson administration defended it in court during World War I, they did so on the understanding that noncitizens with connections to a foreign belligerent could be “TREATED AS PRISONERS OF WAR” under the “rules of war under the law of nations.”
History of the Alien Enemies Act:
The Act has been invoked three times throughout the nation's history, each time during a major intercontinental war: the War of 1812, WWI, and WWII. In World Wars I and II, the law was instrumental behind the DETENTIONS, EXPULSIONS, and RESTRICTIONS targeting immigrants based solely on their ethnicity and ancestry.
The Japanese internment camps during WWII are an illustrative example of this, where about two-thirds of the interned Japanese-Americans were U.S. citizens, despite the state’s attempts to keep its enforcement to just non-citizens. The last time the Alien Enemies Act was challenged, the Supreme Court upheld President Truman’s extended reliance on the law THREE YEARS after the end of World War II.
How the Alien Enemies Act will be used today:
Trump is trying to sell the perception of a threat to the American people by using protesters, many of whom are citizens of the US, as a scapegoat to attack ANYONE and EVERYONE (but mostly those who are Black and Brown) just trying to survive under capitalism. The problem with a president’s ability to use the Act is it relies on their own personal vibes-based opinion of a threat, meaning Trump can use literally anything to justify these actions.
While many protesters are mobilizing against US imperialism, specifically against the Israeli apartheid state and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), human beings have the RIGHT to resist their oppressors by WHATEVER MEANS NECESSARY, regardless of legality. We must organize because an injury to one is an injury to all.