Naoko Fujii\u2019s great-grandfather Jotaro Mori was out fishing when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941.<\/p>\n
When Mori returned home hours later, the FBI was waiting at his door, ready to arrest him under a wartime law that declared citizens of foreign adversaries \u201calien enemies\u201d. He was detained without due process and spent the next four years in concentration camps across the western US, including the infamous camp Lordsburg in New Mexico where two elderly Japanese internees were killed<\/a>. The government seized his home and laundry business so that when he was released, he was left with nothing.<\/p>\n \u201cThere was no warrant, no charges, no evidence he ever did anything,\u201d said Fujii, who added that, at the time of his arrest, her great-grandfather had been living in America for more than four decades. \u201cHe was picked up just because he\u2019s Japanese.\u201d<\/p>\n In March, Donald Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 for just the fourth time in US history, deporting scores of Venezuelan migrants, without due process, to a mega-prison in El Salvador. Civil rights groups challenged the administration\u2019s authority to use the law, which is now being heard by the conservative 5th circuit court of appeals.<\/p>\n As the case looks likely to soon reach the supreme court, advocates and legal experts pointed to the dangerous precedent established by the last time the law was invoked, which led to the mass incarceration of both immigrants and US citizens of Japanese descent.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Alien Enemies Act normalized the idea of internment and targeting people not based on their conduct but on their ancestry,\u201d said Katherine Yon Ebright, counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice and leading expert on the history of the 18th-century law.<\/p>\n The law stipulates that, when war is declared, \u201call natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects of the hostile nation\u201d over the age of 14 can be apprehended or removed. This means anyone who was born or holds citizenship in a country considered a \u201cforeign adversary\u201d is vulnerable, Yon Ebright said, whether or not they actually pose a national security threat.<\/p>\n \u201cBy the structure of the law,\u201d Yon Ebright said, \u201cyou can be targeted based on who you are and where you\u2019re born, not what you\u2019ve done.\u201d<\/p>\n The Alien Enemies Act was one of four laws passed as part of the sweeping Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798; the three others have since expired or been repealed. The law was invoked just three times in US history, all in times of war.<\/p>\n On 7 December 1941, in the immediate aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack, President Franklin D Roosevelt invoked the Alien Enemies Act to round up more than 31,000 Japanese, German and Italian nationals. Two months later, the law paved the way for executive order 9066, which directed 120,000 Japanese on the west coast \u2013 two-thirds of whom were US citizens \u2013 to internment camps across the country.<\/p>\n In the 1940s, Japanese immigrants faced an impossible situation, said Aarti Kohli, executive director at the legal services group Asian Law Caucus. Discriminatory federal laws barred<\/a> them from becoming naturalized citizens, which made them targets under the Alien Enemies Act.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a catch-22,\u201d Kohli said. \u201cThey were targeted because they weren\u2019t citizens, but they also couldn\u2019t become citizens.\u201d<\/p>\n The Trump administration<\/a> invoked the law to deport more than 200 Venezuelan migrants it accused of being members of the transnational criminal gang Tren de Aragua. Similar to Japanese internees, experts say, Venezuelan deportees were not given a chance to disprove the government\u2019s accusations. In a 14 March memorandum<\/a>, the Department of Justice claimed that the Alien Enemies Act allows federal law enforcement officers to conduct warrantless house raids and deportations without court hearings.<\/p>\n Government deception is one throughline connecting the current and most recent invocations of the Alien Enemies Act, Kohli said.<\/p>\n In 1983, the organization was part of a multi-team effort to clear the conviction records of three Japanese Americans held in wartime concentration camps. Their legal cases uncovered proof that the justice department suppressed, altered and destroyed intelligence reports that acknowledged Japanese Americans did not pose a military threat to the US.<\/p>\n