Alien Enemies

Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans were forced from their homes and incarcerated in concentration camps during World War II for nothing. The dispossession and dehumanization of an entire population—approximately 125,284 Japanese and Okinawan immigrants and American citizens; the violence and pain, suffering and loss; the innumerable lifetimes of hauntedness: nothing. That was my first thought when I heard that Trump was resuscitating the Alien Enemies Act (AEA) of 1798 to disappear Venezuelan immigrants to a mega-prison in El Salvador. If anything positive was going to come out of the concentration camps—if a silver lining could be traced on the engulfing weight and long, leaking shadow of trauma that incarceration produced—it was going to be a population of survivors and descendants radicalized by their experience into fighting for it to never happen again, therefore the prospect of it never happening again.

It was predictable, the thought; having just published two books on Japanese American incarceration, my mind was already there. But I was also transposing people; the AEA was invoked, in 1941, against Japanese immigrants, not Japanese American citizens, although the disappearance of the former enabled the incarceration of the latter. The thought was also naive. Of course it was for nothing. The historical record, capped by the Civil Liberties Act of 1988—which apologized and paid reparations—tells us, or confesses, that incarceration was a product of racism and hysteria, not the claimed “military necessity.” The Act did not, however, commit the United States to a legitimate examination of its racism, nor did it claim that the United States would never again detain populations of people without charge or incarcerate them without due process. The law was a settlement. As with so many laws purporting to redress racist violence—lasting one night or hundreds of years—it filed incarceration away in the archives while slyly setting aside its most useful components for future use.

Welcome to the future. 1798: the settler colonial nation was in its early twenties. The AEA was one of four laws passed as part of the Alien and Sedition Acts; the other three went extinct (two expired, one repealed). The AEA made it legal for non-citizens to be “apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed” in a time of “declared war” and with the full authority of the president. It was not devised during a time of “declared war,” though, but in anticipation of a war—with France (which was eventually waged, but never actually declared). Although the AEA does not provide a definition of war, it cites as further justification a “predatory incursion” (which also did not apply to the war with France). That’s not defined either, leaving the law’s actionable conditions to the imagination and expedience of whomever might be president.

FDR invoked the AEA immediately after Pearl Harbor to authorize the disappearance of 5,500 Japanese immigrants; the FBI was knocking on doors within hours. The Japanese in Hawaii had been surveilled since at least the late 1910s; by the early 1930s, the entire population of Japanese in America was under surveillance; in 1940, with the passage of the Alien Registration Act, all non-citizens over the age of fourteen were required to submit to a registry. Japanese immigrants, many of whom had been living in the United States for half a century, were deemed predatory, their presence an incursion. Many were the parents and grandparents of citizens who watched as they were disappeared from their homes and places of work with no indication of where they were being taken, their assets confiscated and their bank accounts frozen.

My grandfather, who was born in Hiroshima and immigrated to the United States when he was nine, was one of these “alien enemies.” He would not have recognized himself in those words. I didn’t either, until ten years after he died, when I encountered them in his FBI file, which makes a circuitous attempt at determining (1) if my grandfather, a photographer, was a spy, and (2) if his presence was “harmful to the country or the people in it.” According to the Department of Justice’s Alien Enemy Control Unit: (1) no evidence yet, but that doesn’t mean anything, and (2) yes.

History is a house filled with guns, not under lock and key, but scattered all over the house, fully loaded. During his 2024 presidential campaign, at a rally in Aurora, Colorado, Trump said that as president he would invoke the AEA in an effort to “target and dismantle every migrant criminal network operating on American soil.” He repeated “1798” several times, saying, “That’s a long time ago, right?” The AEA appears in chapter two of the Republican Party’s 2024 platform, not as a possibility but a guarantee: “We will also invoke the Alien Enemies Act to remove all known or suspected gang members, drug dealers, or cartel members.” It doesn’t mention “war,” but with “suspected” invents a limitless interpretation of enemy.

It took less than two months for the gun to be fired. On March 15, Trump invoked the AEA to abduct 238 Venezuelan immigrants who his administration alleged were members of Tren de Aragua, a transnational criminal organization. According to the proclamation, Tren de Aragua have been engaging in “irregular warfare,” “harming United States citizens,” and are involved in a “plot against America.” The men were disappeared to the el Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo in Tecoluca, El Salvador, a maximum-security prison (capacity: forty thousand). The majority of the men had no criminal record, and yet the lack of evidence linking the majority of them to Tren de Aragua was offered as proof of their guilt. “The lack of specific information about each individual actually highlights the risk they pose,” wrote Robert Cerna, ICE field office director, in a sworn court statement. “It demonstrates that they are terrorists with regard to whom we lack a complete profile.” This white nativist spuriousness is a direct echo of what John Dewitt, commanding general of the Western Defense Command, wrote in 1942 of the Japanese in America: “The very fact that no sabotage has taken place to date is a disturbing and confirming indication that such action will be taken.”

A scan of articles published in March about the AEA yields such words and phrases as “arcane,” “anachronistic,” “digging deep into history,” “historical dust.” But a law that is still on the books is contemporary. Despite bearing its mark, the AEA was not behind, for example, the abduction by ICE of Mahmoud Khalil, an activist and graduate of Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. Nor was it behind the arrests of Rümeysa Öztürk, Mohsen Mahdawi, or Badar Khan Suri, among a number of students and scholars who have been abducted and/or whose visas have been revoked for protesting against Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza and in support of a free Palestine. Khalil, a legal permanent resident and a Palestinian, was arrested by men in plainclothes in the lobby of his Columbia-owned building on March 8, handcuffed, and led to an unmarked SUV. His wife, Noor Abdalla, filmed the whole thing on her phone. When she asked one of the men for his name, he answered, “We don’t give our name.” Khalil was taken to 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan, transferred to a detention facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey, then transferred again to the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Jena, Louisiana, where approximately seven thousand people are currently incarcerated.

This is the implementation of policies that have been produced by the long-standing and lucrative obsession with immigration enforcement—and, more broadly, social control—shared by Republicans and Democrats alike. In an article published in Truthout a week after Khalil’s arrest, Silky Shah, executive director of Detention Watch Network, cited the “normalization of incarcerating immigrants” as enabling Trump’s more naked fascism. “Both parties,” she writes, “have largely accepted a hyper-enforcement mentality that has only resulted in more and more dehumanization of immigrant communities, and in turn harsher anti-immigrant laws.” Which have resulted, in turn, in more and more dehumanization.

The normalization of cruelty extends far beyond the incarceration of immigrants. There is little to separate the aspiration to run “the largest deportation operation in history” (Trump) from the aspiration to maintain “the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world” (Kamala Harris). The people targeted for deportation by the United States and the people forced to seek asylum from the conditions often created, in whole or in part, by the United States, are the same people. But cognitive dissonance has become a political orientation. It has framed our watching—daily, hourly, for generations—the reality of what American money and materiel does to entire populations of people, their bodies, their histories, their land.

In Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire observes that every time an act of brutality is accepted as fact, “civilization acquires another dead weight . . . a gangrene sets in . . . poison has been distilled into the veins.” “And then one fine day,” Césaire writes, “the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss.” The torturers have been revising, the gestapos have been busy, and the prisons have been full for generations.

A month after his arrest, an immigration judge ruled that Khalil could, under the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (which, incidentally, made Asian immigrants eligible for citizenship), be deported for his pro-Palestinian activism. The sole piece of “evidence” was a memo submitted by Secretary of State Marco Rubio stating that Khalil’s presence in the United States had “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.” What does it say about the United States that the presence, alone, of a person of conscience might have an adverse effect on its foreign policy? What does it say about its foreign policy?

Foreign is to alien as policy is to enemy. What, after all, might an “adverse consequence” be? The demise of international capitalism, of the colonial-imperial disorder? The recuperation of fragmented communities, land? The revelation of interconnectedness, reciprocity? An orientation towards existence that surpasses survival? Life, liberation? “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny,” wrote Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”   

In a letter written in ICE detention and published in the Washington Post on March 17, Khalil cites Japanese American incarceration, in particular the case of Mitsuye Endo, who was incarcerated in the Tule Lake and Topaz concentration camps, challenged her incarceration in the Supreme Court, and won. “Her victory helped secure the release of thousands of others,” Khalil writes.

When I encountered Japanese Americans in Khalil’s letter, I was and was not surprised. When he mentioned Endo, I could feel her voice reaching his ear. It was empowering to imagine two prisoners discovering each other across time, space, and circumstance. I began to think of Endo as a kind of ancestor to Khalil, one who had to endure the morbid insanity of a similar and similarly wasteful trial.

In July 1942, Endo challenged the legality of her incarceration through habeas corpus. She was the ideal plaintiff: born in Sacramento, had never been to Japan, did not speak or read Japanese, had a brother in the military, was Christian. She was, in other words, legible and safe to white America. Most importantly, she was loyal to the country, which she confirmed, or was obliged to confirm, on the application for leave clearance, a.k.a. the “loyalty questionnaire” the War Department and War Relocation Authority devised to judge the assimilability of each prisoner.

The questionnaire was a trap, especially for the Issei, who, ineligible for citizenship, were risking statelessness. It also provoked what became, and continues to be, a foundational question: how one chooses, or is forced, to be American. It almost goes without saying that a Japanese American who refused the questionnaire, who refused pledging allegiance or conscription into the army—or exhibited any form of resistance (and there were many who did)—would not have been chosen for the case. Though initially reluctant to act as the plaintiff, Endo was convinced by the assurance that her testimony would liberate everyone; she even refused the government’s offer to release her in exchange for dropping the case. Her victory ultimately led to the closing of the camps, but it was a victory for the United States too. Its concession was liberty contingent on loyalty. The success of Endo’s case was due, in no insignificant part, to her being “concededly loyal” in the eyes of the Supreme Court. The case certified the terms and conditions—the provisionality—of citizenship. For those not yet eligible for citizenship, loyalty offered no additional rights but demanded of them a disorientation towards their country of origin.

“Japan is hell,” my grandfather said under interrogation by the FBI, adding, “Give me a gun to go and fight Japan.” It’s in his FBI file. He is described, while being questioned, as having “difficulty restraining tears.” I have spent years straining to see the look on his face and decipher the nature of his crying. The government, by wringing out of him a distressed, desperate belligerence fulfilled a small part of its insatiable passion: it turned an “alien enemy” against his origins and into an American. It makes sense that he was pledging allegiance, intentionally or inadvertently, to the United States, by saying that he would, if given the chance, kill Japanese people. Because he was pledging allegiance to war.

As terrified as America is of the aliens and enemies it has invented to defer dealing with its own deterioration, it is more terrified of the people, in their actuality and essence, on whom they have forced their inventions. What is an alien but the hallucination or projection of a haunted, mortified body—a person, a people, a nation—in the midst of being separated from its soul? Doesn’t that also describe an enemy? The haunted, mortified body depends on the alien and the enemy, and their assimilation or destruction, to maintain belief in its own existence. If an alien elicits the possibility of being assimilated, an enemy is the foreclosure of that possibility. An enemy, then, is the alien who refuses to pledge allegiance. What we are witnessing now, however, in our return to the future of 1798, is the removal of even that distinction. In an interview on Democracy Now, Mohsen Mahdawi described the moment he was arrested. He wasn’t at home, like Mahmoud Khalil, or walking down the street, like Rümeysa Öztürk, but at his citizenship interview at an immigration office in Vermont. Less than a minute after he was asked if he would pledge his allegiance to the United States (he answered, “Of course”), ICE agents, hooded, masked, carrying guns, “stormed the office” (Mahdawi’s words), and said, “You’re under arrest.”

The arbitrariness of tyranny is intentional cruelty, and it’s tempting to say that’s the point. But for however terribly ironic it is that pledging allegiance is the cue to being arrested, it is even more terribly accurate. Because if pledging allegiance to the nation is pledging allegiance to war, then its confirmation would manifest precisely in the appearance, anytime, anywhere, of stormtroopers. To become a citizen is to become complicit in a system of oppression to which citizens, themselves, are not immune. There is nothing new or arcane about that. “Fascism has established itself in a most disguised and efficient manner in this country,” wrote George Jackson, revolutionary, in San Quentin prison. The fascist turn is not sharp. It is a relinquishment of the disguise. And, as Jackson wrote, “The final definition of fascism is still open.”

When I was asked by The Baffler if I would be interested in writing about the Alien Enemies Act, I initially said no because I knew that to address it, I would have to rehearse the story of Japanese American incarceration. That is, I think, why I was asked. But the rehearsal of the story was beginning to feel pathological, preserving people in their state of arrest while taking the focus away from the people who are struggling now and away from the specificities of their struggle. I also knew that to rehearse the story, I would have to resurrect my grandfather and return him to the marginal—and derisively historical—time in his life he spent the rest of his life trying to escape; I would have to turn him into an Alien Enemy Wind-Up Doll™.

Maybe these rehearsals and resurrections are an inevitable part of the responsibility of being a citizen-descendant, made to bear, in this country, unending witness. And yet, when I think about my grandfather, I do not think of him in the moments when he was being surveilled and interrogated. I think of him, and more clearly, in ways that defy his usefulness as an historical example. Behind the wind-up dolls and FBI files; behind the walls and razor wire of concentration camps and supermax prisons; behind the excessive force of executive fiat, are lives perfectly illegible to the laws—new and so old they are new—that seek to define them. People belong to their people. And it is from their people that they can never be taken.