# Alien Enemies Act The **Alien Enemies Act** (July 6, 1798; 50 U.S.C. §§ 21–24) is the one surviving statute of the [[Alien and Sedition Acts]]. It lets the President, "whenever there is a declared war" or "any invasion or predatory incursion is perpetrated, attempted, or threatened … by any foreign nation or government," proclaim that the nationals of that nation aged fourteen and up may be "apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as alien enemies" — without the hearings the immigration code otherwise requires. Invoked three times in two centuries (Madison in the War of 1812; Wilson in 1917; Roosevelt on December 7, 1941, in the proclamations that interned Japanese, German and Italian nationals), it was invoked a fourth time on **March 14, 2025**, in peacetime, against a street gang. That invocation, its execution and the litigation it produced are the vault's clearest record of the second term's method: an old emergency power, a novel predicate, and speed as the substitute for legality. ## The 2025 invocation - **The predicate.** Proclamation 10903 declared that Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan prison gang, was conducting an "invasion or predatory incursion" at the direction of [[Nicolás Maduro]]'s government. The intelligence community had concluded in February 2025, with moderate confidence, that Caracas did not control the gang; a declassified April National Intelligence Council memo said the same, and [[Tulsi Gabbard]] fired the Council's acting chair and deputy a week after it surfaced. [[Stephen Miller]] had described the statute's appeal on a 2023 podcast: it "allows you to suspend the due process that normally applies to a removal proceeding." - **The flights.** The White House announced the proclamation on Saturday, March 15, 2025, after the [[ACLU]] had already filed *J.G.G. v. Trump* in anticipation. Chief Judge [[James Boasberg]] certified a class and ordered at 6:48 p.m. that any plane in the air "needs to be returned." Two planes that had left Harlingen, Texas at 5:26 and 5:44 p.m. flew on; 261 men were delivered to El Salvador's CECOT prison, 137 of them under the Act, the rest under ordinary removal authority — see [[Kilmar Abrego Garcia CECOT]] for the wrongful-removal case that came out of the same flights. ## The litigation - ***Trump v. J.G.G.*** (April 7, 2025). The Supreme Court vacated Boasberg's order on the emergency docket, 5–4: challenges must be brought in habeas in the district of confinement — but the Court also held that detainees "must receive notice … within a reasonable time and in such a manner as will allow them to actually seek habeas relief" before removal. The ACLU then filed in every district holding Venezuelans. - ***A.A.R.P. v. Trump*** (May 16, 2025). After the government moved to fly men out of north Texas on roughly 24 hours' notice, the Court blocked it, 7–2, holding that notice must give a real chance to be heard. - **The merits.** Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr. (S.D. Tex., a Trump appointee) held on May 1, 2025 that the invocation was unlawful — a gang is not a "foreign nation or government" and its crimes are not an invasion — the first time a court had rejected an AEA proclamation. A Fifth Circuit panel agreed in September 2025; the en banc court dismissed the case as moot on **August 13, 2026** (*W.M.M. v. Trump*) because the named plaintiffs had already been deported under regular authority, with several judges writing that they would have upheld the President. Rodriguez's ruling stands as the only merits decision; the statute's meaning is unresolved at the appellate level. - **Contempt and return.** Boasberg found probable cause on April 16, 2025 that the government had criminally defied his order; the D.C. Circuit vacated that finding on August 8. On June 4, 2025 he certified the CECOT class and held they had been denied due process, and in February 2026 ordered the government to facilitate the return of Venezuelans by then scattered to third countries after the July 2025 prisoner swap that emptied CECOT of them. See [[Third-Country Removal]]. ## Why it matters The Act was the fastest of the seven bypass tracks in the [[Immigration Removal Pipeline]], and it failed — not because the courts rejected the President's reading of "invasion," which they never finally reached, but because the Fifth Amendment's notice requirement, reaffirmed unanimously in *J.G.G.*, made speed impossible. What survived was the *sequence*: proclaim on Friday, fly on Saturday, litigate for a year. The same statute that supplied the legal form for the 1942 internment of Japanese nationals (the citizens were interned under Executive Order 9066) is the one the administration reached for first; the vault's [[Japanese American Internment]] page is the calibration case. See [[Unitary Executive Theory]] for the theory, [[Second Trump Administration]] for the program, and [[Alien and Sedition Acts]] for the 1798 origin. ## See Also - [[Alien and Sedition Acts]] · [[Immigration Removal Pipeline]] · [[Third-Country Removal]] · [[Kilmar Abrego Garcia CECOT]] - [[James Boasberg]] · [[ACLU]] · [[Stephen Miller]] · [[Tulsi Gabbard]] · [[Nicolás Maduro]] - [[Unitary Executive Theory]] · [[Second Trump Administration]] · [[Emergency Powers Crosswalk]] · [[Rule of Law]]