JACL Celebrates the Reintroduction of the Neighbors Not Enemies Act

On January 22nd, 2025, Representative Ilhan Omar and Senator Mazie Hirono reintroduced the Neighbors Not Enemies Act in the 119th Congress (H.R. 630 and S. 193). These are simple and straightforward bills that repeal the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 in its entirety and are vitally needed to provide a check to unbridled executive power. 

The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 was signed into law by President John Adams during our nation’s infancy and is the only one of four Alien and Sedition Acts that remains today. The Alien Enemies Act grants the president the power to order the arrest, detention, and deportation of citizens of an “enemy nation” during wartime. Detained foreign nationals of enemy nations are treated as prisoners of war whose detention could continue after wartime hostilities end. While this law may have been necessary 227 years ago, we now have extensive national security laws that criminalize acts of espionage and further grant the President expansive surveillance powers to identify potential national security threats. Modern national security laws and enforcement apparatus render the Alien Enemies Act obsolete, overly broad, discriminatory, and ripe for abuse by the Executive Branch.

The Alien Enemies Act was most recently and famously used by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1941 to order the arrest and detention of Japanese, German, and Italian nationals residing in the United States immediately upon US entry into WWII. The use of the Alien Enemies Act set the stage for President Roosevelt to further expand his wartime powers with the issuance of Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, which led to the mass incarceration of over 125,000 people of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of whom were American citizens. 

On January 20th, 2025, President Trump issued an executive order titled “Designating Cartels And Other Organizations As Foreign Terrorist Organizations And Specially Designated Global Terrorists”  directing the Attorney General, Secretary of Homeland Security, and Secretary of State to make preparations for the Alien Enemies Act to be invoked by the President to expedite mass deportations under the false claim that undocumented immigrants are a threat to our national security.  President Trump acted similarly in 2016 when he issued Executive Order 13769 also known as the “Muslim Ban” that prohibited individuals from predominantly Muslim nations from entering the United States, also under the false guise of national security. 

We see the common thread in the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act as the false claims of a threat to national security in order to target groups for other discriminatory purposes. Most egregiously in the case of Japanese Americans, the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) later determined that the government was fully aware that Japanese Americans as a group posed no threat, but still pushed a racist campaign of mass incarceration, and in some cases, forced deportation of Japanese nationals and Japanese Americans who were pressured to renounce their birthright citizenship to a country that was imprisoning their families without cause. We cannot allow similar unjust actions to be taken again under the auspices of the Alien Enemies Act.

This sentiment is shared by the attorneys of the Coram Nobis teams for Korematsu, Yasui, and Hirabayashi, who shared their thoughts: “We support the Neighbors not Enemies Act to repeal the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a dangerously xenophobic law that could be used to detain and deport people based solely on their ancestry or citizenship. The Alien Enemies Act was last invoked during World War II along with Executive Order 9066 to justify the incarceration of more than 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry without due process of law. We urge Congress to prevent such civil liberties abuses by passing the Neighbors not Enemies Act.”

The Japanese American Citizens League is pleased to join a diverse coalition of over 80 organizations to support passage of the Neighbors Not Enemies Act to prevent a repeat of the injustices of WWII. We thank Representative Omar and Senator Hirono for their leadership on this issue.