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AEA was one of four laws passed as part of the Alien and Sedition Acts; the other three went extinct (two expired, one repealed).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.