Alien and sedition redux

Many of us recall from Junior High School Civics, discussions of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, enacted under the administration of Federalist President John Adams. They arose from the escalating tensions of the “Quasi-War,” an undeclared naval conflict between the United States and France. The conflict was triggered by the French Revolutionary government’s anger over U.S. neutrality in the broader European struggle between France and Britain. In response, France began seizing American merchant ships, pushing the fledgling United States into a defensive posture.

The Alien and Sedition Acts were composed of four distinct laws, each addressing different concerns of the time. The Alien Enemies Act empowered the president to detain or deport citizens of hostile nations during wartime. The Alien Friends Act extended executive authority to expel any non-citizen deemed a threat, even in peacetime. The Naturalization Act made it more difficult for immigrants to become citizens by extending the residency requirement from five to 14 years. The Sedition Act, perhaps the most controversial, criminalized speech or writings critical of the government, a move that many saw as an assault on free expression.

Over time, three of the four laws were either repealed or allowed to expire. The Sedition Act was left to die in 1801 under Thomas Jefferson’s administration, as it had become an unpopular tool for suppressing political opposition. The Alien Friends Act expired in 1800, and the Naturalization Act was repealed in 1802, reducing the residency requirement back to five years. However, the Alien Enemies Act remains in effect, quietly surviving the political changes of the past 225 years.

This law has been invoked three times, first during the War of 1812, when President James Madison applied it against British nationals, again during World War I, when President Woodrow Wilson used it to detain German nationals in the United States, and most notably during World War II, when its provisions contributed to the internment of Japanese, German, and Italian nationals. That period, in particular, remains one of the darker chapters in American history, when thousands of Japanese-Americans—many of them U.S. citizens—were forcibly removed from their homes and placed in internment camps. While subsequent legal decisions and legislation have sought to ensure due process protections for those classified as “enemy combatants,” the Alien Enemies Act remains on the books and was utilized as recently as March 15 of this year.

President Trump invoked the act to facilitate the deportation of members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua (TdA), an organization accused of violent crimes across multiple states. The move was met with swift judicial pushback, with a federal court temporarily blocking its enforcement. Critics argue that the application of this wartime measure in a peacetime context represents an overreach of executive authority and an erosion of due process and freedom of association. Supporters, on the other hand, view it as an effective tool to expedite the removal of dangerous individuals who are in the country illegally, rather than a shift in broader immigration policy.

The argument that the law’s invocation is illegitimate because the U.S. is not in a declared war is a weak one—after all, the Alien and Sedition Acts were themselves born out of an undeclared conflict. However, the broader concern remains: Does the use of this law weaken essential American principles of justice? Can we reconcile the urgent need for public safety with the constitutional guarantees of due process and individual freedoms?

Let’s take seriously the business of making our streets safe and ridding our country of the bad actors who would gladly steer us toward cartel-controlled chaos. But let’s do so in a way that upholds two of the defining pillars of the American experiment: due process and freedom of association.