Alien and Sedition Acts

The Alien and Sedition Acts were a set of four laws enacted in 1798 that applied restrictions to immigration and speech in the United States.^[a] The Acts were passed by a Congress controlled by the Federalist Party over the opposition of the Democratic-Republicans, the party typically favored by immigrants and political émigrés. The prosecution of Democratic-Republican journalists under the Sedition Act trials rallied public opinion against the Federalist administration of John Adams and contributed to the victory of the Democratic-Republicans in the elections of 1800. Under the new administration of Thomas Jefferson, only the Alien Enemies Act, granting the President powers of detention and deportation of foreigners in wartime or during threatened invasion, remained in force after 1802.

Against the backdrop of the undeclared Quasi War with the French Republic, the Federalists argued that the acts were essential to national security. Democratic-Republicans denounced the legislation as a tool of government repression and as a violation of First Amendment rights of free speech.

The surviving Alien Enemies Act has been invoked three times since 1800, in the course of major declared wars: the War of 1812, World War I and World War II. The law is best known for its partial role during the Second World War in the disproportionate Internment of Japanese Americans. (Most of the 120,000 people of Japanese descent incarcerated in U.S. internment camps were U.S. citizens detained solely on the basis of their Japanese ancestry, under the authority of Executive Order 9066 issued by President Franklin Roosevelt in early 1942. On a much smaller scale, order 9066 also enabled incarceration of U.S. citizens of German and Italian descent).

Following his second-term inauguration as President in January 2025, Donald Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act to expedite the removal of non-citizens engaged in what he claimed was an organised criminal-gang "invasion" of the United States. His authorization of the deportation of Venezuelan suspected gang members, under the presumed terms of the Act, is being litigated in the courts. In the first three months of the second Trump Administration, most other deportations from America have been carried out under other legal bases.^[3]

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