The Alien Enemies Act

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At 5.45 p.m.

Eastern Time on Saturday, March 15th, 2025, a plane took off from Harlingen, Texas.

As that plane flew south, turning towards Honduras, news alerts went off in the United States.

President Trump invoked a wartime law that gives him sweeping deportation powers.

It's called the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.

It gives presidents power to order the rapid detention and deportation of non-citizens older than 14.

It is clear the U.S.

is not in a war right now.

But in his order, Trump described Venezuela's Trendaragua prison gang as a force invading the U.S.

Many view this move as an attempt by the Trump administration to accelerate deportations.

I think an old law is a virtue, not a vice.

The ACLU sued to stop these deportations and a federal judge agreed to temporarily block them.

Despite this, a plane landed in El Salvador, carrying hundreds of deportees from the United States.

It's unclear if the deportations violated a judicial order.

President Trump asked the Supreme Court to intervene.

He wanted the injunction, which a federal judge put on his ability to use use the Alien Enemies Act, to be lifted.

The Supreme Court ended up issuing a narrow procedural ruling, lifting the order, saying the migrants should have filed their cases in the states where the migrants were being detained and not in Washington, D.C.

But the justices avoided answering the question of whether or not Trump's use of the Alien Enemies Act was constitutional.

And that's the law at the heart of this story.

The Alien Enemies Act allows presidents to detain or deport citizens of foreign adversaries to the United States, but only if a declared war or invasion of the U.S.

has taken place.

The Trump administration, including Tom Homan, the president's border czar, is arguing that the 137 Venezuelans it deported using the Alien Enemies Act were, in a sense, invading the United States.

as alleged members of the gang Tren de Aragua, or TDA.

TDA is the enemy of this country.

We know TDA, based on a lot of evidence,

are part of the

Maduro regime through the military and law enforcement.

They've infiltrated them.

And look,

they've invaded this country to unsettle this country, whether it's through

fentanyl killing thousands of Americans or through the violence they're perpetrated in our cities.

President did the right thing.

I stand by him.

But at least 27 of the men the Trump administration deported without a trial did not have deportation orders against them.

An ICE official has conceded that, that, quote, many did not have criminal records.

And court filings showing the criteria Department of Homeland Security officers used to identify the alleged gang members indicate that they relied heavily on tattoos, which investigative reporters who have studied the TDA gang say are, quote, unreliable, and quote, highly subjective as evidence.

Critics of the Trump administration's actions are calling its use of the Alien Enemies Act a massive overreach, an abuse of executive power.

But Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, told reporters in March that the president is using the law exactly as the founding fathers intended.

The founding generation that wrote this law very clearly, these are the same people who wrote the Constitution,

very clearly wanted to ensure the president had the broadest range of authority to remove from the nation non-citizens who are part of an alien enemy force.

And that's the authority the president has.

And in the coming days, you will see the full suite of presidential authorities used to extirpate this gang, this terrorist organization, from our soil.

All of this left a lot of people wondering, where did the law at the center of all of this come from?

Is what's happening now in line with how U.S.

presidents have used the Alien Enemies Act in the past?

So with that in mind, we wanted to talk to someone who has read this law and who has studied the role it's played in American history.

What's old is new again.

Daniel Tishner is a professor at the University of Oregon.

I teach political science and I'm also the co-director of the Waymore Center for Law and Politics.

He studies the history of immigration in the U.S.

and recently wrote an article Breaking Down the Alien Enemies Act for the Conversation, an independent news site written by academic experts.

I certainly did not expect to be talking about, you know, this obscure 18th century law.

It has always been

there for the taking if a president wanted to try to use it as a way to exercise really broad, unrestrained powers in terms of the arrest, regulation, detention, and removal of non-citizens.

I'm Randab Dilfatta.

And I'm Ramteen Arab Louis.

On today's episode of Through Line from NPR, Where the Alien Enemies Act came from, how American presidents have used it before,

and what that tells us about what's to come.

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Part 1,

Enemies.

The Alien Enemies Act is one of the United States' oldest immigration laws.

And for many Americans, the history of immigration in this country is personal.

It's the story of how they or their ancestors came to the United States and what challenges awaited them.

That's the case for Daniel Tishner, a professor of political science at the University of Oregon.

How did you get into studying immigration?

Part of the answer is that I'm the grandson of immigrants.

And so I think I've always been fascinated by the topic.

So on the one side of the family are German Lutherans, on the other side are Hungarian Jews.

Amazingly, my sister and I have had relatively little therapy,

despite that.

So I grew up hearing lots of stories of

the struggles that members of my family had encountering the paper walls of the State Department during the Holocaust, trying to get family desperately out

of Hungary on the one side.

On the other side, you know, my grandparents were German immigrants, came from working-class families, and, you know, they came here and tried to start over

and

do well economically.

So I think that was always in my brain.

I don't think I set out to study immigration, but that obviously was always there.

We called Daniel because he's a self-proclaimed nerd on the history of U.S.

immigration policy.

And after President Trump issued his March 2025 executive order invoking the Alien Enemies Act, we wanted someone to explain it to us, starting from the beginning.

If you could take us back to the 1790s, basically, and paint a picture of the kind of

context, the social political context of that moment where the Alien Enemies Act is passed.

So the social political context, if anyone's seen the musical Hamilton, they may have some sense of the context.

The Alien Enemies Act was drafted in 1798, more than a decade after the end of the Revolutionary War.

The country was deeply polarized.

On one side were the Federalists, Alexander Hamilton's party, and the party of John Adams, who was the president at this time.

They wanted a strong federal government and a close relationship with England.

On the other side, Thomas Jefferson's Democratic-Republican Party wanted the opposite, power divided between states and a cozy alliance with the French, whose navy was busy waging a war with the English.

And what was happening in 1798 was that there was lots of naval confrontation between the U.S.

and France.

There was a sense that we were

facing an impending war with France.

So Federalists in Washington were

particularly unnerved by all of this.

They felt that we needed to ready the country for a possible war with France and were in no mood to put up with any kind of disloyal speech.

So that's where the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 came out.

The Alien and Sedition Acts were made up of four laws.

The most famous and controversial one was the Sedition Act.

It made it illegal to, quote, print, utter, or publish any false, scandalous, and malicious writings about the U.S.

government.

Basically, the Federalists, who had a majority in Congress, wanted to prevent the Democratic-Republicans from undermining the government as it prepared for a possible war with France.

And during the three years the law was in effect, they used it, making 25 arrests, 15 indictments, and 10 convictions.

But another one of the four sedition acts slid more under the radar.

The Alien Enemies Act.

Whenever there is a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government, The Act has a few requirements.

First of all, it's clearly not supposed to be used in peacetime.

It says there has to be a declared war between the United States and a foreign nation or government.

Second part.

Any invasion or predatory incursion is the same.

It can only be used against citizens of the foreign country or government that's at war with the U.S.

And finally, those people have to be 14 years or older, and they can't be U.S.

citizens.

The president is authorized in any such event by his proclamation thereof.

If all those criteria are met, the president is allowed to apprehend and deport non-citizens.

The Alien Enemies Act in particular gave presidents broad authority to apprehend, detain, and remove non-citizens who were aged 14 years or older, who are from a hostile nation or government when that country was in a declared war with the U.S.

or was in an active invasion of U.S.

territory.

Active invasion.

So the declared war seems kind of

black or white.

Yeah, yeah, that part's easy.

Yeah, but the active invasion part seems like it could be open to interpretation.

Correct.

So the key part of that is the notion that a foreign nation is in the active attempt or engaged in a clear invasion of U.S.

territory.

And this part kind of dovetails with Article 2 of the Constitution, which says that presidents have the power to repel a foreign invasion.

So even if you don't have a, at that point, you might not have declared war, but to keep us safe, you need that kind of decisive, independent action from somebody in government.

That's when a president under this legislation has this power over non-citizens who are 14 years or older.

Who are they thinking of, you know, given the context, you know, the French and the British naval, you know, wars that are happening?

Who are they thinking of when they're when they're coming up with these restrictions?

So they're they're particularly worried about the French, but also at the time, the Federalist Party was particularly hot and bothered about French and Irish immigrants

who they worried were disloyal.

They knew they were voting in larger numbers or kind of leaning towards Jefferson and the Democratic-Republicans.

And so

that was the group that they had in mind.

But I'll just add really quickly, John Adams never invoked it because in his interpretation, we were never, obviously there was never a declared war with France.

Moreover, he did not see an act of invasion taking place.

So he never used it.

Was there pushback immediately when this is passed in the sense that did anyone say this is like too much power for the executive branch?

What was the kind of immediate response from the public and also other politicians?

yeah, there was definitely a populist backlash led by Jefferson and Madison, but

overall, the kind of a sense that the Alien Assession Acts were incredibly unpopular.

They were politically disastrous for John Adams, even though he was lukewarm about them himself.

And a lot of it was about

protecting the Bill of Rights and not having that easily violated by

a tyrannical regime.

And so that's

how the Republicans and Jefferson framed it as this, this is, you know, a fundamental threat to the basic liberties of people in this country.

And by the way, he won pretty decisively in 1800.

So that kind of shored up that critique.

So since this was like a big issue that created popular backlash and potentially helped Jefferson win, why wasn't it repealed?

Why after 1800 was this not like completely done away with and repealed?

I think because it wasn't really used.

So the Sedition Act was used.

It was deeply unpopular.

Lots of attention, lots of squabbling

in newspaper columns and speeches on the floor of Congress about the Sedition Act, about whether it was just or not.

Because Adams never invoked the Alien Enemies Act, it really didn't get a lot of attention.

And so my hunch is that it was kind of swept under the rug in some ways.

Let's fast forward.

When does it actually get used for for the first time or invoked by a U.S.

president for the first time?

So there's irony in this because it's Jefferson's key partner

in creating a new party and a new government.

It was under James Madison during the War of 1812.

By 1812, naval spats between the British and the French had escalated to an all-out war.

The United States tried to stay neutral while Napoleon and the British traded shots on the Atlantic.

But when the British started intercepting American merchant ships and pressing sailors into service, President James Madison felt like his hand was forced.

So it's a declared war.

And of course, the hostilities are with Britain.

And it's a pretty mild use of the Alien Enemies Act because what Madison says is he wants all British nationals who are living in the country to report what their age is, because remember, 14 years is the key cutoff in the law, where they're living, how long they've been in residence, and whether they plan to naturalize.

And we don't know, we don't have records to know exactly how many adhered to this,

whether there were kind of, you know, draconian uses of it.

But from what we can tell from the historical record, you know, it was declared, invoked, and,

you know, it didn't seem to raise a lot of eyebrows.

And what's also interesting about that is there must have been a lot of British nationals in the U.S.

at that time.

So this seems like a monumental task to kind of have an encountering of all those people.

Was it like for intimidation or did they actually seem to think that they could do it?

Well, he invoked it very early.

So, so maybe it was meant to be something that was like, you know, as we're preparing for this, let's also have this in our tool belt.

I see.

So, the War of 1812 comes and goes.

You know, many people know the story.

The British burn down the White House.

They invade D.C.

It's this big event.

The U.S.

passes through that.

When is the next instance in which it's used?

The next time is World War I.

It's another declared war.

And this time it has more teeth than when we saw it unveiled in 1812.

The U.S.

declared war on the German Empire in April 1917.

Woodrow Wilson was president.

And not long after, Wilson invoked the Alien Enemies Act right off the bat.

This time, Wilson wants to use it to force those who are foreign nationals from Germany, Bulgaria, Austria, and other central powers to register,

to regulate them, and in some cases to intern them.

And so about a half million Germans living in the country were registered by the U.S.

Marshal Service.

You might remember this is the time when Americans have this anti-German hysteria and sauerkraut became liberty cabbage, reminds you of freedom fries, right?

Yeah.

And has had implication about what people could be employed for and so forth.

And in addition,

Germans living in the country had to surrender weapons,

sometimes had to surrender radios if they were considered suspicious, because that might be used for espionage purposes.

They couldn't live near certain munitions factories and other things.

And probably the most draconian part of this is around 6,000

German non-citizens ended up being interned as enemy aliens during the war.

And they were sent to internment camps in Georgia and Utah.

Oh, wow.

That word in the American context I associate with World War II, Japanese.

Exactly.

So I had no idea that this was happening during World War I.

What does the enforcement of that actually look like on the ground during the war?

Well, there's both an official and quasi-official version of this.

The official part, as I mentioned, the U.S.

Marshal Service was called into action to do this.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation was active in this.

And so we had, you know, formal U.S.

officials who were making sure this was happening.

I think local and state police cooperated.

But we also had in place at the time, the American Protective League was a group of about

several hundred thousand Americans

who had volunteered to help secure national security for the country in towns and cities across the U.S.

And so folks would volunteer and they would they would eavesdrop on their German neighbors, maybe open up their mail.

If they were in restaurants, they would sit near them.

And so they played a role in this as well.

That sort of sounds like your neighbor is policing you, right?

That's an unsettling image, you know, in the American democratic context.

Very much so.

And if you had a German accent, you particularly faced enormous scrutiny.

What about the families of those people?

Was that affecting the spouses and the families as well?

I mean, there's two levels of this.

One level is if you're among those 6,000 Germans and Austrians and others who are being shipped off

to internment camps in Georgia and Utah, you're usually being shipped off from Midwestern and Northeastern cities.

So, you know, your family members going a long ways and you have no contact with them.

And so I think that had to be extraordinarily traumatic for those families.

And then I think, you know, if you were facing facing the registration requirements and other forms of surveillance, I'm sure that put incredible stress on your family as well and made you very cautious and careful, especially in public.

And I'm sure, you know, felt very repressive.

But those, you know, in contrast to the

6,000 who were interned, at least you were an intact family dealing with it together.

I see a pattern here.

Each time it seems to be invoked, it seems to get more intrusive and more intense.

So this is World War I.

So can you tell us about how the Alien Enemy Act was invoked in World War II?

Sure.

And just to underscore again, this is the third time it's invoked.

It's another declared war.

Franklin Roosevelt uses it to authorize a whole set of special regulations and restrictions on German, Italian, and Japanese non-citizens.

And you're right that each time the ante goes up.

So in some ways, it replicates what Wilson did in World War I in terms of requires non-citizens to register.

You now have the FBI,

which is playing a lead role in this.

You have kind of a similar set of restrictions in terms of gun ownership, where one could live if you were considered living near somewhere that kind of a sensitive national security area.

They didn't want you there.

You had to be fingerprinted.

You had to tell me kids you had.

So basically all kinds of surveillance and scrutiny.

And

in this war, 30,000 foreign nationals were interned under the Alien Enemies Act, mostly Germans and Italians and some Japanese.

And so the first thing you might ask is, wait, what about Japanese internment?

President Franklin Roosevelt invoked the Alien Enemies Act immediately after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941.

Within a few months, the Department of Justice had more than 2,000 Japanese nationals, non-U.S.

citizens, in custody, along with more than 1,000 Germans and 264 Italians.

In early 1942, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which gave the government the authority to forcibly remove and incarcerate U.S.

citizens of Japanese descent into, quote, relocation centers.

Historically, this process has been referred to as quote internment and the centers as quote camps.

That is what led to the internment of both Japanese American citizens and Japanese non-citizens.

The Alien Enemies Act

in some senses was kind of, you know, the first step in this regard.

And so in a sense, then what you have here is,

you know, two parallel things.

One is this sweeping executive Japanese internment order issued from Roosevelt.

And the second is this Alien Enemies Act,

which is following the law in terms of targeting foreign nationals from countries that we were in active conflict with.

Over the course of the war, nearly 120,000 U.S.

citizens and residents of Japanese descent were forcibly relocated and incarcerated, many of them for three years or more.

The majority were American citizens.

Tishner says this instance raises an important point about the Alien Enemies Act.

It can only be used to justify the detainment or deportation of people who aren't citizens.

That explains why Roosevelt needed an executive order.

At least one of the key reasons is that The Roosevelt administration did not just want to go after Japanese non-citizens.

They were also going after

a huge population of Japanese American citizens, especially on the West Coast.

Franklin Roosevelt was well informed by J.

Edgar Hoover and other intelligence officers that there was no clear evidence that Japanese American citizens and non-citizens of the West Coast had actively engaged in any sabotage,

or at least nothing that would justify the mass removal and interment of those populations.

Aaron Ross Powell, General John DeWitt played a key role in this mass removal and incarceration.

But when he was confronted with the fact that there was not significant evidence of sabotage, he said,

the mere absence of this

does not undermine the notion that they pose a threat because they are forever connected to

Japan, because the racial strain,

his exact words is, the racial strain is undiluted no longer how long they have lived in this country.

So it's clearly kind of

national security

laid upon pure racism.

And during this time, the immigration system is probably getting more and more complex, meaning there's different kinds of status you can have.

When they invoked the Alien Enemies Act, is it essentially wiping away anyone who doesn't have citizenship?

If you had something like a permanent residence or a visa or something like that, was it covering basically anyone who was not an either naturalized or a birthright citizen during these times?

That is exactly correct.

Yes.

Coming up, the Alien Enemies Act is invoked for the fourth time in American history.

And for the first time ever, it's used during peacetime.

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Part two,

the invasion.

When World War II ended in 1945, so did President Roosevelt's use of the Alien Enemies Act.

And for the rest of the 20th century, the law faded into the background, even as the United States fought in more wars without explicit declarations of war.

During that period, is it invoked again?

It is not.

Daniel Tishner is a professor of political science at the University of Oregon.

So after World War II, for the rest of the 20th century, it's not invoked again at all.

And why not?

Good question.

I mean, it may be that this 18th century obscure law just faded into the woodwork as being something that was, you know, a relic of the past.

Clearly,

Congress and presidents had all kinds of control powers over non-citizens that they could use that didn't require invoking this legislation.

So for instance, Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s ordered a mass deportation of undocumented immigrants.

And,

you know, it was a huge dragnet raid that involved you know, U.S.

military, local police, state troopers, and so forth.

And tens of thousands of mostly Latin

folks were rounded up, put on buses and driven across the Mexican border.

It turned out that a number of those folks were Mexican-American citizens, some of them were legal permanent residents, they were not undocumented and so forth.

And so some of them were legal proceros.

But that's an example where, you know,

he

you know, was able to basically push a button from the Oval Office and do it.

And it did so without invoking

this legislation.

It was basically the idea was these are individuals who were suspect of being unauthorized in U.S.

territory.

Therefore,

in my enforcement powers as president, I am doing so.

Aaron Ross Powell, to me, there's something really striking about the fact that there was so much both covert and explicit power that the executive had, that these intelligence agencies had, that these things could happen.

And you didn't even need to invoke, as you say, like this dusty law from the 18th century.

So

it makes me wonder why is it that now, you know,

March 2025, we suddenly hear about the Alien Enemy Act all of a sudden after decades.

My sense is that as the Trump team was preparing to enter office, they viewed this law and his powers for presidents as a way to streamline the process of removing non-citizens.

And so, you know, basically it's like deportation on rocket power.

Non-citizens have at least some due process,

you know, a possibility of having a day in court if they face detention and removal.

And what the Alien Enemies Act does is it says, the president acting on behalf of keeping us safe, on behalf of national security, in repelling a foreign attack or in active warfare has the capacity on our collective behalf to just remove you point blank, end of story.

And something's sticking in my head here that you said earlier when we're talking about the actual Alien Enemies Act and what it says, and this term that Run brought up, invasion.

How is invasion being used right now to kind of justify the use of the Alien Enemies Act?

The argument that I think the administration is making is that Latin American governments are run by drug cartels and criminal organizations that are launching state-sanctioned invasions of narcotics and unauthorized migrants into the country.

The key here, because it goes back to the law, the law is saying either

declared war or a foreign government launching an invasion.

And so the key here legally would be to say, we are invoking, we as the Trump administration are invoking this because these Latin American governments

basically are

under the thumb

of these kind of criminal operations and cartels and so forth.

And so that these narcotics and unauthorized migrants are in fact

their invasion forces.

And thus we have the right

to repel it.

The key arbitrator in this is going to be the courts.

The reality is that,

as we've noted, it's only been during,

only three times it's been used has been during declared wars in the past.

And so a lot of this comes down to whether the court

wants to intervene or not, whether the Supreme Court is going to basically decide that

a president's identification of an invasion by a foreign nation is determinative or whether it's subject to judicial review.

And the Supreme Court's history on this has been uneven.

We talked only a moment ago about the Japanese internment case in Korematsu versus the United States, which was decided in 1944, the court basically gave a president a blank check in terms of Japanese internment.

And there's an even another chilling

decision than the Kieran decision that had to do with German saboteurs who FDR seized and

had tried by a military tribunal.

And in both cases, the court, you know, privately had lots of misgivings and lots of questions about the constitutionality, but ultimately decided that during this time of life or death, of World War II, that the president had to be given that discretion.

And at the time,

one of the dissenting judges in that Japanese internment Koromatsu case, Justice Robert Jackson, said, when you give a president this amount of power, unrestrained power, it's like leaving a loaded weapon on the desk of the Oval Office.

Now, fast forward to

post-9-11,

George W.

Bush's presidency, we have a lot of Guantanamo Bay detainees, and

the Bush administration's initial plan was to have military tribunals, and the Supreme Court said no.

that there were due process rights that had to be followed in that.

So the court, you know,

in World War II said the president has extraordinarily broad prerogative powers that are unchecked to keep us safe in the name of national security.

And then in the post-9-11 period, the Supreme Court actually said, wait, there are certain fundamental due process and constitutional protections.

that must be maintained even when you claim it's on behalf of national security.

So the question in this situation is whether this invocation of the Alien Enemies Act will have a court response akin to World War II or one akin to what the court did post-9-11.

And so just to be clear, the question that they have to answer is, can the president just decide what an invasion is and what isn't an invasion?

And if they say yes, then will any of this matter?

in this historical context.

Yeah, I mean, if they say yes, then there's no restraint.

And Robert Jackson would say, I told you so.

Wow.

The Constitution from the very beginning in Article II

gave presidents broad unilateral powers when it came to guarding the national security.

So in a sense, it's sort of in the DNA of that institution and

an opening for exercising this kind of authority.

That logic creates the possibility that a president can do almost anything

in the name of national security.

The flip side is Sandra Day O'Connor in the subsequent military tribunal case in the early 2000s said, no, there are certain constitutional rights and protections that are sacrosanct,

even when you invoke national security.

And we will, we as a court will measure.

We will try to actually judge

whether, in fact, the crisis that you say requires this in fact does or not.

And so that's what I guess we'll all find out soon.

Coming up, how the Alien Enemies Act Evolves When the President's Power Grows.

This is Jack from Springfield, Illinois, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR.

Thank you for the show.

I absolutely love it.

Former history major, current government employee.

Just absolutely love it.

Love the contacts you bring.

And I think this world would be a better place if more people listen to this show.

So again, thanks.

Bye.

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Part 3, on the desk of the Oval.

We spoke with University of Oregon political science professor Daniel Tishner at the end of March, about two weeks after President Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act to deport more than 100 people who he alleged were gang members.

Since then, the U.S.

Supreme Court allowed the deportations to continue while challenges to President Trump's use of the Alien Enemies Act make their way through federal courts in Texas and New York.

And so now the question is,

what's going to happen in terms of as this moves up the pipeline?

There's two elements of this that are going to be important to watch.

One is what happens when the Supreme Court takes this up and what the court may decide, or whether it decides, again, as I mentioned earlier, to ultimately determine that it's not going to weigh in because a presidential determination of whether we're facing an invasion is determinative or not.

The second part is if the court does weigh in, the interesting thing about

the Guantanamo military tribunal case is that the Bush administration followed that decision, adhered to it.

What happens if the Trump administration decides it is not going to follow a Supreme Court ruling or a lower court's ruling?

I mean, it's already talked about impeaching judges and so forth.

And so

that becomes an ultimate test because

courts do not have a police force or army to implement their decisions.

And, you know, there's the famous Worcester versus Georgia decision during the Jacksonian era in which the Supreme Court upheld a treaty between the United States and the Cherokee nation saying that they could not be forcibly removed from Georgia.

And apocryphally, Andrew Jackson said, well, Mr.

Marshall has made his law, now let him enforce it.

Open question whether that was actually said, but that's what happened.

In essence, the Cherokee

people were removed despite the court's decision because ultimately the executive decided not to implement what it had decided.

There's a lot of, I think, anger and emotional response out from a lot of people to this invocation of the Alien Enemies Act and the deportation of the migrants and the fact that it's not clear whether the Trump administration actually listened to the court order, et cetera.

But we have to say, you know, under the Obama administration, there was record numbers of deportations, many of which were questioned by immigrant rights groups around around the country.

What is it about this moment?

Do you think that's like garnering this response outside of the rhetoric that we're hearing from the Trump administration?

Because I'm sure there's an argument that, in terms of numbers and in terms of rights violations, that you know,

President Obama and President Biden also did a significant number of these kinds of acts.

That's a great question.

And I think one

way to think about it is that

every president in the modern era,

by the stroke of a pen, can exercise enormous power over the fate of non-citizens.

And so, you know, as you said, you know, during President Obama's time in office, he removed record numbers of individuals.

And it captures the extent to which

presidents from Obama to Trump

actually

can engage in dramatic levels of deportation.

I think

on the other hand, what's distinctive about invoking the Alien Enemies Act is it removes

any

slight veneer of due process.

Yes, I understand.

That is, non-citizens who are facing deportation don't have a lot of rights.

But there are some.

And when the Alien Enemies Act is invoked, there's no day in court.

There's no appeal.

There's no delay.

Essentially, it just, you know,

creates an immediate act,

which is why it's, you know, described as deportation on rocket power or rocket fuel.

At least that was the case before April 7th, 2025.

According to a new Supreme Court ruling, detainees must now receive adequate notice that they're being removed under the Alien Enemies Act and be given an opportunity to challenge their removal.

You mentioned the post-9-11 Guantanamo decision.

And I guess I'm wondering, is there something directly connecting the Guantanamo decision then with how this act might be interpreted by the courts now?

Yeah, I mean, prior to that War on Terror decision and the fate of the Guantanamo Bay detainees in terms of tribunals, tribunals, you could

point to a steady

set of legal interpretations that

basically

endorse presidents having completely unrestrained

presidential prerogatives when it comes to war.

That is, enormous emergency powers.

And the court basically deferred.

And I think what so troubled Justice Jackson at the Core Matsu decision and other decisions during World War II was was the extent to which the court basically,

to be frank, cowered

in the face of presidential exercise of power on behalf of us during that existential crisis.

And so, what stands out about the decision post-9/11 is

that

it was this significant example of the court

exercising

clear judgment

about whether there would be any restraint on presidential power in the name of national security.

And I think this case puts that front and center again for us.

You know, I think one of the things that has come up is the distinction between citizen and non-citizen.

Is there a universe in which if the court you know, determines it's fine for the permanent residency, let's say the green card holders, the visa holders, that it will eventually also mean that citizens can be subject to deportation eventually.

Is that where it leads potentially?

You know, Donald Trump tweeted

not long ago that if the president is doing something to keep us safe, it cannot be illegal.

And

that's actually akin to something that Richard Nixon had said in the 70s, which is if the president does something, it can't can't be unlawful.

And the idea is then, and this goes back to kind of

philosophical perspective that John Locke captured in Prerogative Powers, which sometimes you empower a leader to act on her behalf, even where the law is silent and sometimes even against it,

if it in fact serves our broader interests, especially when it comes to national security.

And so I think the short answer is that

that logic creates the possibility that a president can do almost anything in the name of national security if the court isn't willing to engage in the kind of perspective that Sandra Day O'Connor justified or argued for.

Aaron Powell, is this ultimately a story of the executive branch's growing power over the last, I mean, basically since, you know, the Constitution was still initially formed, it seems to me that this is a part of a function of a like increasing power grab from the executive branch, regardless of what party the executive branch is represented by.

Oh, yeah,

I think that's quite accurate.

I mean, presidential scholars debate about when the modern presidency started.

Some people say Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, because that's when you have this popular rhetorical presidency.

Others say, no, no, no, no.

It really begins with Franklin Roosevelt as he presides over the Great Depression and World War II.

Whenever you want to pinpoint it, there's no question that during the New Deal era of FDR and World War II, you have have the development of a significant administrative state.

That is, that enormous amounts of power and authority and budget dollars and employees and programs and so forth are consolidated within the executive branch.

And

as the presidency scholar Sidney Milkus from UVA puts it, the administrative state, the administrative presidency can be a two-edged sword.

used whether you're on the left or right in that office.

And so that's a significant part of this.

The other thing, but on immigration in particular, what stands out is we've had lots of powerful presidents, Lyndon Johnson,

Ronald Reagan and others, where if you told them that the president would basically sit atop immigration governance, they wouldn't believe you.

Because for most of this century, of the 20th century, Congress really was the key branch determining immigration policy, at least in terms of, you know,

key legislation and so forth.

And so Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Truman, Eisenhower, all incredibly frustrated that Congress really

was playing the key role.

What really changed that was our partisan polarization has meant that during the 21st century, Congress is deeply gridlocked on immigration reform.

And yes, we saw the Lake and Riley Act passed, but really when it comes to more significant legislation, it's like waiting for Godot.

That is, it's never going to arrive.

We are stuck in neutral.

And in that context, to fill the void, you've had state and local governments or so-called immigration federalism much more active.

You have the courts active.

But most decisively,

you have presidents with lots of unilateral power

involved really in making immigration and refugee policy in America.

What are you most concerned about or attentive to right now about where this could be going next?

One is that I think it's very traumatizing and chilling.

The law

and other kinds of draconian restrictions can be weaponized

not just in terms of who's specifically targeted by it, but has a much broader effect on

you know, the everyday lives of those who may not be targeted but are living in fear in some ways.

And it takes me back to my own grandparents' experiences where they felt like they were under

more intense scrutiny.

My grandfather learned English well and didn't have much of an accent, but my grandmother

had a harder time picking up the language, had more of a discernible accent.

And so she didn't go out as much.

She stayed inside.

She wanted to stay sheltered away from this.

And I think what we're seeing today has the potential, if not already, has taken place where it's that on steroids, that it just has

this impact on how free people feel to live their lives.

Daniel, thanks so much for your time.

My pleasure.

That was Daniel Tishner, political science professor at the University of Oregon and co-director of the Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics.

And that's it for this week's show.

I'm Rand Abdel Fettah.

And I'm Ramteen Arab Louis.

And you've been listening to Through Line from NPR.

This episode was produced by me.

And me.

And...

Sarah Wyman.

Julie Kay.

Lawrence Wu.

Anya Steinberg.

Casey Miner.

Christina Kim.

Devin Katiyama.

Irene Naguchi.

Thank you to Johannes Durgi, Edith Chapin, Colin Campbell, Tommy Evans, and Anna Yukonanov.

Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vokel.

The episode was mixed by Robert Rodriguez.

Music for this episode was composed by Ramteen and his band Drop Electric, which includes Navid Marvi, Sho Fujiwara, Anya Mizani.

And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at throughline at npr.org and make sure to follow us on Apple, Spotify, or the NPR app so you never miss an episode.

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