Releasing Alien Enemies
After World War II, people classified as alien enemies were released into the United States. Will the same happen this time?
By the time World War II broke out, Susumu Shimizu had already lived in two continents. Born in Japan, he moved to Peru in 1925 when was just eighteen-years old. In Lima, he joined his family’s business in the capital city’s bustling Japanese community. But when the United States joined the war after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, everything changed for Japanese citizens living 4,000 miles south of San Diego.
To the United States government, Shimizu was too dangerous to live and work freely half a hemisphere away. Under an order from President Franklin Roosevelt, they were declared “enemy aliens” and, with the help of Peruvian authorities, brought to the United States. Until President Donald Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act in March, the Roosevelt years were the last time the 18th century wartime law had been used.
Shimizu spent his earliest years in the United States at the Japanese internment camp in Crystal City, Texas. Writing alongside the daughter of Max Ebel, a German citizen who was also detained as an enemy alien, Shimizu’s daughter, Grace Shimizu, explained, “Neither Max nor Susumu had broken any law or posed a threat to the United States. Yet the U.S. government imprisoned these men for years in World War II internment camps.”
After the war, Crystal City was the last of the internment camps for families of people pegged as alien enemies to close. When it finally did, in February 1948, U.S. immigration officials had to figure out what to do with the people being held there. Some had been brought here for incarceration. Others were already living in the United States. But all of them had been described as threats to national security.
Shimizu might have been sent to Japan, where he was a citizen, but the United States had obliterated the city where he was born, Hiroshima. He could have returned to Peru, where he had been living when U.S. officials asked him to be rounded up, but already declared too dangerous to live there, Peru’s government had no interest welcoming him back. Instead, Shimizu spent the rest of his life as a landscape gardener near San Francisco. “He is lovingly remembered for his kindness and generous support of his family, friends, church, and the Japanese-Latin American redress efforts,” his obituary says.
Shimizu and Max Ebel were not alone. Through the end of 1947, U.S. State Department officials were still bringing people into the United States as enemy aliens. But now marked as threats to the security of the United States, many could not return. In the 1948 fiscal year, the Immigration and Naturalization Service reported that the Peruvian government accepted the return of four former residents of Peru of Japanese descent. Another 290 continued living in the United States on parole.
With nowhere to send them, immigration officials began releasing enemy aliens into the United States, sometimes under court order and other times using their own discretion. During the 1949 fiscal year, the INS released sixty-seven German citizens from alien enemy incarceration – 38 percent of the total number of German alien enemies detained in October 1948. The agency also released twenty-five of twenty-seven Japanese citizens who had been ordered removed as alien enemies.
Three-quarters of a century later, history is repeating itself. This week a federal judge, Barbara Holmes, ordered the Trump administration to release Kilmar Abrego García, the citizen of El Salvador who ICE mistakenly deported. Claiming he is a member of MS-13, the gang that originated in California in the 1980s, Trump officials said he would never return to the United States. Federal courts, including a unanimous Supreme Court, forced the administration’s hand only for Trump’s team to bring him back to face prosecution for human smuggling. Prosecutors wanted him locked up while awaiting trial, but a federal judge in Tennessee said that the government had failed to show that Abrego García is likely to endanger the public or fail to show up for required court dates. Lawyers for the federal government and Abrego García are scheduled to appear in court today to argue over any conditions on release that the judge might impose. Whatever the outcome, he isn’t likely to head back to his home in Maryland; ICE will almost surely detain him instead.
The post-war experience of German and Japanese citizens incarcerated as alien enemies suggests that Judge Holmes is right to consider releasing Abrego García. Hundreds of people stained with the stigma of wartime dangerousness were ultimately released. All of them were described as threats to national security. Many, like Susumu Shimizu, picked up the pieces of the lives that the U.S. government had shattered. They rebuilt in cities throughout the United States. Some even became U.S. citizens in the years following their de-classification as alien enemies.
In the 1951 fiscal year, immigration officials denied sixty naturalization applications because of alien enemy classification. By contrast, that year federal officials approved 54,716 naturalization applications. Federal officials who were quick to label people as enemy aliens could not make the claim stick when forced to show their evidence.
Whatever end Abrego García meets, the same is already happening. Trump administration officials say he is a foreign invader who is dangerous to the United States. But under the scrutiny of judicial review, their evidence is falling apart. It will likely take time before he is able to return to the life he was living before ICE arrested him on a Baltimore street in March, but when he does we may learn that, like Susumu Shimizu, Abrego García is just an ordinary person living in extraordinary times.