Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign has sparked fresh controversy with his plan to invoke the Alien Enemies Act, a law from 1798, for mass deportations. This proposal has drawn alarming comparisons to the forced incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, an era remembered for its devastating impact on Asian American communities.
As reported by The Independent, Trump’s strategy aims to detain and deport immigrants from countries considered enemies, echoing the discriminatory policies that led to the internment of over 120,000 Japanese Americans under Executive Order 9066 during WWII.
Critics, including civil rights groups, have drawn parallels between Trump’s proposed plan and Adolf Hitler’s authoritarian policies. During that time, Japanese Americans were stripped of their civil rights, detained in internment camps, and subjected to widespread prejudice.
People Magazine reports Trump’s strategy is sparking outrage among human rights advocates. Many argue that reviving the Alien Enemies Act could lead to widespread racial and ethnic profiling, intensifying fears that Asian Americans—who have been historically scapegoated during national crises—could once again face undue discrimination and civil rights violations.
As Trump’s 2024 campaign progresses, the Asian American community and human rights groups remain on alert. Many warn that his proposal risks repeating one of the darkest periods in U.S. history, potentially deepening racial divides and harming immigrant communities across the nation.
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A more powerful and impactful comparison could be made by providing the approximate numbers of Latin “Mexican” Americans who were moved and forcibly removed from U.S. soil across the U.S. and Mexico border during the Great Depression. When I first learned of this removal in 2008, The Sacramento Bee provided a number of less than 15,000; subsequent articles have given 1,500,000 and 2,000,000 adults and children that were moved across the border after the start of the Depression, including 400,000 from Los Angeles. This was supposed to have been done through an Executive Order by President Hoover. I think that one of the facts that is constantly missed by the media is the fact that Latin Americans are not a race or ethnicity of and by itself, they are Hapas, the Hawaiian word for people of mixed race and ethnicity. A significant part of this mix is indigenous people of the Americas, aka Native Americans.
Locking up illegal aliens who broke into our country is similar to locking up American Citizens in what way exactly ?
This plan calls on deporting all immigrants from “enemy nations” both legal and undocumented.