Japanese American Internment

The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 was a law most notoriously used to incarcerate American citizens of Japanese descent during World War II. The Act is a wartime authority that allows the President of the United States to “detain or deport the natives and citizens of an enemy nation.”

The United States rounded up 120,000 of its own citizens and placed them in concentration camps around the country beginning in 1942.

One of those camps was Manzanar, on the rugged Eastern side of the Sierra Nevada mountains.

The above animation is based on an incredible photograph made by Toyo Miyatake, who smuggled a lens and film into Manzanar, then made a camera out of scraps of wood.

The Alien Enemies Act may be invoked again on the day of this writing, this time to justify deporting hundreds of thousands of immigrants in the United States.

Even though we are not at war with Mexico, Honduras or even Venezuela, the current U.S. administration is determined to use a wartime authority to expel people who came to this country to flee violence and oppression, or simply to seek a better life.