Federal judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr. May 1 ordered a stop to President Donald Trump’s moves to use the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to detain and deport people accused of being members of Tren de Aragua, a criminal gang from Venezuela.
Citizens of a foreign country, regardless of their status in the U.S., can be “apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as alien enemies” by presidential order, the law says, when they come from a country the U.S. is at war with or from which an invasion is “attempted or threatened.”
The Alien Enemies Act has only been put into effect three times since it was enacted. The first time was during the War of 1812, when President James Madison’s administration took on the British, hoping to seize Canada. The other times the act was used were by Democratic Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt in the first and second imperialist world wars.
Trump invoked the act March 15, claiming members of the Venezuelan gang had invaded the U.S. to conduct “irregular warfare” in collaboration with the Venezuelan government and military. The act sets aside the constitutional due process rights of anyone targeted under it. Within days, over 250 people had been seized and deported to El Salvador.
The Trump administration had reached an agreement with the government there to imprison the deported Venezuelans indefinitely in the notorious male-only CECOT prison. In its haste, the Department of Homeland Security included eight women among those deported, who had to be returned. Among those imprisoned were two dozen Salvadorans, including Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
Three Venezuelan nationals who had been incarcerated at the El Valle Detention Center in Texas challenged the deportation order, saying it violated their right to due process under the Fifth Amendment.
Judge Rodriguez agreed, ruling the administration’s use of the law “exceeds the scope of the statute.”
However, he did not attack the statute itself, pointing to a 1950 U.S. Supreme Court ruling upholding the Alien Enemies Act. “Executive power over enemy aliens, undelayed and unhampered by litigation, has been deemed, throughout our history, essential to war-time security,” the high court had asserted.
The law was part of the Alien and Sedition Acts, aimed at curtailing constitutional freedoms after the American Revolution. Like the Espionage Act, it gives Washington the power to tear up protections in the name of safeguarding “national security,” in reality the national interests of the U.S. capitalist class.
President Woodrow Wilson invoked the Alien Enemies Act in April 1917 during World War I. He order all people of German descent to register with the government, banned them from owning arms and radios, and imposed restrictions on where they could live, work or travel to. These steps weren’t based on evidence of criminal acts, but purely on the individuals’ nationality. Some 6,300 people of German descent were interned in military-controlled camps.
Japanese put in concentration camps
Far and away the most extensive use of the Alien Enemies Act began after Washington entered World War II. Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt invoked it to round up and intern some 112,000 people of Japanese descent in concentration camps without a trial. Their property was seized. Another 10,000 Germans and some 3,000 Italians were also interned.
Most liberal commentators hailed the government’s decision to toss constitutional protections aside. The American Civil Liberties Union approved Roosevelt’s action, while arguing some of his directives were excessive. To its shame, the U.S. Communist Party backed Washington’s roundup of Japanese Americans, suspended its Japanese members, urged them to turn themselves in and denounced so-called Japanese fifth-columnists. This was an integral part of the CP’s course of pressing workers to subordinate their class interests to the U.S. rulers’ imperialist war efforts.
In stark contrast, the Socialist Workers Party campaigned against Roosevelt’s assault on constitutional protections and his concentration camps. Washington’s actions were “a repressive measure, based purely on racial discrimination,” the May 30, 1942, issue of the Militant said, forcing Japanese Americans to live as “virtual war prisoners of their own government.”
This refusal of the liberals and Stalinists to stand up to the capitalist rulers’ use of the Alien Enemies Act during World War I and II helped pave the way for its imposition today. The act, and its use by Trump, is a stark reminder of how the U.S. rulers will wield their state power against working people, especially as they prepare for war.