The Alien Enemies Act of 1798: How Trump Plans to Deport Millions of Immigrants

Using wartime emergency powers, activating military reserves, and relying on the support of like-minded Republican governors, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has detailed his plan to deport millions of illegal immigrants from the United States.

The UK Sunday Times said that this operation would fundamentally change America, because Trump will resort to the Alien Enemies Act, which allows the president to detain and deport individuals from a country considered an enemy of the U.S. during wartime.

Trump has repeatedly sought to blame the Joe Biden administration for illegal immigration to the U.S., trying to portray them as killers and dangerous, and saying that America is being invaded.

Trump made hardline immigration policies a centerpiece of his political identity during his 2016 campaign, promising to deport all immigrants living in the U.S. illegally, but he failed to do so.

Mass Deportations

Former US President Donald Trump recently claimed the U.S. has become a garbage, as he railed against illegal immigration during a campaign rally.

A cornerstone of Trump’s 2024 campaign has been his promise to carry out the largest deportation operation in US history, without explaining how the plan would be implemented, but in recent rallies, Trump has said he would use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to do so.

Axios reported that the Republican candidate has expressed his intention to invoke the 226-year-old law, which has previously been used to detain enemy aliens in wartime.

At an October 11 rally in Reno, Nevada, Trump said the deportations would begin in Aurora, Colorado, and would be called ‘Operation Aurora’.

He also asserted that federal task forces would be established to target immigrant populations in cities, and local police be given blanket immunity from prosecution.

Earlier that day, during another campaign rally in Aurora, he said he would invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to expedite the removal of gang members and target and dismantle every immigrant criminal network operating on U.S. soil.

Trump was referring to a Venezuelan gang called the Tren de Aragua, which he said had taken over multiple apartment complexes in Aurora.

Allegations that a Venezuelan gang had taken over Aurora surfaced last August, when a video emerged of a group of armed Spanish-speaking men walking through an apartment complex in the city.

However, local officials have responded by saying that concerns about Venezuelan gangs in Aurora are largely exaggerated.

Congress, with the support of President John Adams, passed the Alien Enemies Act as part of the four Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 as the U.S. stood on the brink of war with France.

The Republican Party at the time opposed the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 as a gross violation of civil and due process rights. 

The law has been used three times in American history during the War of 1812, during World War I, during World War I, and during World War I.

Key Issue

Trump’s proposed policy to round up and deport immigrants has divided Americans, according to a poll by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), in partnership with the Brookings Institution.

According to the poll, nearly 79% of Republicans favored putting undocumented immigrants in detention camps, compared with 47% of independents and 22% of Democrats.

The same PRRI poll found that the United States has become more conservative on immigration policy.

In contrast, several left-leaning immigrant advocacy groups have called for a media campaign or changing poll questions to help Americans see how mass deportations can destroy families.

Immigration is one of the key issues in the upcoming November elections, and polling demonstrates that Trump’s proposals appeal to large swathes of the population. 

A September poll by Scripps News/Ipsos found that 54% of Americans strongly or somewhat support the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. 

Opinions cleave sharply along party lines. Polling by Pew Research Center found 88 percent of Trump supporters support mass deportations, compared to 27% of supporters of Vice President Kamala Harris. 

However, that same poll found that 70% of all registered voters support admitting immigrants to address labor shortages.

During his first presidential campaign in 2016, Trump attacked immigrants, considering most of them rapists, drug traffickers, and criminals.

When Trump took office, there were an estimated 11 million people in the country illegally. From 2017 to 2020, the Department of Homeland Security recorded 2 million deportations.

In June, the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, reported that the Biden administration had carried out 4.4 million deportations, more than any single presidency since George W. Bush.

Staggering Abuse

Civil liberties experts and advocates have warned that the law could violate immigrants’ rights, leading to the detention of legal residents and their U.S.-born children.

Legal experts said Trump does not have the authority to invoke the Alien Enemies Act against gang members or as a tool for mass deportations, noting that to invoke the act, the invasion must be committed or threatened by a foreign government.

“It would be difficult to use the 1798 law to detain immigrants unless Trump declares criminal networks to be a foreign state,” Katherine Yun Ebright, senior counsel at the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program, told Axios.

“Invoking the law in peacetime to bypass conventional immigration law would be a staggering abuse,” she said.

Trump and his allies have characterized the rise in illegal immigration under President Joe Biden as an invasion, though legal and immigration experts have disagreed with the characterization.

“The illegal migration or drug smuggling at the southern border is not an invasion,” Ilya Somin, a George Mason, a constitutional law professor at George Mason University, said.

“Defining illegal immigration as an invasion and migrant gangs as foreign nations would be an uphill climb in federal court,” George Fishman, former deputy general counsel at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under Trump, wrote last year.

Katherine Yon Ebright said it’s unclear whether courts would intervene to stop the Alien Enemies Act from being used in peacetime.

Steve Vladeck, a Georgetown University constitutional law professor, wrote that there are already immigration laws that allow for deportations. 

“But a main challenge against carrying out a mass deportation operation is the lack of resources required to find, detain, and deport a large number of people,” he said.

A recent report by the American Immigration Council estimated that a one-time deportation operation to evict millions of undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. would cost at least $315 billion.

A decade-long operation to deport one million people annually would cost roughly $88 billion per year, with the majority of that cost dedicated to building detention centers, the report concluded. 

Any large-scale deportation effort would likely affect numerous critical industries, as well as reduce national GDP, according to several studies.