This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.

President-elect Donald Trump often said during the 2024 presidential campaign that he plans to launch the nation’s largest-ever mass deportation operation in his second term.

Trump has pledged to carry out this work by using an obscure 18th-century law called the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.

The act empowers presidents to apprehend and remove foreign nationals from countries that are at war with the United States. U.S. presidents have issued executive proclamations and invoked this law three times: during the War of 1812, World War I and World War II. All three instances followed Congress declaring war.

Why bother dusting off a 226-year-old law?

Invoking the Alien Enemies Act could make it far easier for the Trump administration to quickly apprehend, detain and deport immigrants living in the U.S. without legal authorization. That’s because the law lets presidents bypass immigration courts.

In my view, if Trump uses the Alien Enemies Act to carry out his mass deportation plans, it almost certainly would trigger major court battles in which the text, early history and previous uses of this antiquated law take center stage.

Repressive origins and populist backlash

The Alien Enemies Act traces back to the late 1700s, when the Federalists, an early political party, controlled Congress. The Federalists wanted strong national government as well as harmonious diplomatic and trade relations with Great Britain.

The Federalists became outraged when the French government began seizing U.S. merchant ships in the Caribbean that were trading with Britain, which France was waging war against at that time.

The opposing Democratic-Republican Party, led by Thomas Jefferson, supported France in its fight against Great Britain.

The Federalists in Congress considered Jefferson’s pro-France position against the U.S. interests. They also were troubled that the Democratic-Republicans were backed by thousands of French and Irish immigrants who had some political clout in big cities such as Philadelphia and New York.

So in 1798 the Federalists tried to quell domestic opposition by passing the Alien and Sedition Acts, a series of controversial laws that banned political dissent by limiting free speech. The laws also made it harder for immigrants to become citizens.

One of these laws was the Alien Enemies Act, which gave presidents broad authority to control or remove noncitizens ages 14 or older if they had ties to foreign enemies during times of a declared war.

The Alien and Sedition Acts elicited a firestorm of criticism soon after they were passed, including from Jefferson and James Madison, who asserted that states have the right and duty to declare some federal laws unconstitutional. The populist backlash against the Alien and Sedition Acts helped propel Jefferson and Democratic-Republicans to victory in the 1800 presidential election. Nearly all of the Alien and Sedition Acts were then either repealed or allowed to expire.

Only the Alien Enemies Act, a law enacted without an expiration date, survived.

The history of the Alien Enemies Act

Madison, the fourth U.S. president, first invoked the Alien Enemies Act during the War of 1812 with Great Britain, which was sparked for several reasons, including trade and territorial control of North America.

Madison invoked the Alien Enemies Act in 1812 by proclaiming that “all subjects of His Britannic Majesty, residing within the United States, have become alien enemies.”

But rather than imposing mass deportations, Madison’s administration simply required British nationals living in the U.S. to report their age, home address, length of residency and whether they applied for naturalization.

More than 100 years later, President Woodrow Wilson invoked the Alien Enemies Act during World War I in April 1918.

Wilson used the Alien Enemies Act to impose sweeping restrictions on the residency, work, possessions, speech and activities of foreign nationals from places that the U.S. was at war with – Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria. U.S.-born women married to any people born in these places were also deemed “enemy aliens.”

The U.S. Marshals Service carefully monitored about half a million Germans in the U.S. to make sure they followed Wilson’s restrictions.

Another 6,000 German “enemy aliens” were arrested and sent to internment camps in Georgia and Utah, where they were confined until after an armistice was signed between the Allies and Germany in November 1918.

Two decades later, President Franklin D. Roosevelt notoriously used the Alien Enemies Act in World War II.

In 1941, Roosevelt authorized special restrictions on German, Italian and Japanese nationals living in the U.S. More than 30,000 of these foreign nationals, including Jewish refugees from Germany, spent the war imprisoned at internment camps because the government considered them potentially dangerous. The U.S. government released these detainees after World War II ended.

The vast majority of the 110,000 Japanese American men, women and children interned during the war were not held under the Alien Enemies Act. The government used a separate executive order during World War II to intern most people of Japanese descent, some of whom were born in the U.S.

What’s very old is new again

Civil liberties and immigrant rights groups have pledged to fight back by filing legal challenges if Trump forges ahead with plans to invoke the Alien Enemies Act for the fourth time in U.S. history.

The Alien Enemies Act’s text and history present formidable legal hurdles for the Trump administration.

The 1798 law is clear that an “invasion or predatory incursion” must be undertaken by a “foreign nation or government” in order for it to be invoked.

Yet Congress has not declared war on any country in over 80 years, nor has another government launched an invasion against U.S. territory.

And drug cartels are not actual national governments running Latin American countries, so they don’t meet the criteria in the Alien Enemies Act.

Trump’s senior advisers, meanwhile, say with no clear evidence that the administration can justly claim that some Latin American governments, such as Mexico and Venezuela, are run by drug cartels that are attacking U.S. security. These officials also allege that these criminal organizations are launching state-sanctioned invasions of narcotics and unauthorized migrants.

Whatever the argument, the tenacious problem that the Trump administration will face is that neither the letter of the law nor historical precedents support peacetime use of the Alien Enemies Act.

None of these textual and historical realities will matter, however, if the courts choose not to intervene on the grounds that a president simply saying that the country is being invaded by a foreign nation is sufficient and is not subject to judicial review.

This possibility makes it impossible to automatically dismiss blueprints for using an 18th-century law, however dubious. If Trump succeeds at invoking the Alien Enemies Act, it would add another chapter to the Alien Enemies Act’s sordid history.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.

The most serious allegations against Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s pick to head the U.S. Department of Defense, involve mismanagement, heavy drinking, infidelity, sexual harassment and even rape.

Hegseth denies the allegations but also claims that because of Jesus he’s a “changed man.” The roots of Hegseth’s version of Christianity are worth a look as he heads into confirmation hearings before the U.S. Senate in January 2025.

In 2023, Hegseth moved from New Jersey to Tennessee to join a church and school community that arises from a 20th-century movement, called Christian Reconstruction. It holds deeply conservative views about the family, roles for women, and how religion and politics are related.

The followers of the movement seek to make America a Christian nation, by which they mean a nation built on biblical law, including its prohibitions and punishments.

Christian Reconstructionists want to dismantle public education and replace modern ideas about family with a patriarchal family model because they claim that biblical law requires both. They believe that Old Testament biblical law applies to today’s society and to everyone, whether or not they are Christian. For them, all of life is religious; there is no separation between religion and politics.

Though only a handful of people are formally tied to Christian Reconstructionism, its influence has been broader.

As a scholar of religion, I have studied Christian conservative movements, especially Christian Reconstructionism, for over 30 years, with six of those years explicitly devoted to the research on Christian Reconstruction. In my book “Building God’s Kingdom: Inside the World of Christian Reconstruction,” I trace the rise of this obscure theocratic version of Christianity.

When the Trump transition team announced in mid-November 2024 that Hegseth was the choice to serve as Secretary of Defense, his pastor posted on X that Hegseth and his family are members of Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship, a church directly tied to this movement. I know through my research that the workings of the church he has joined make it quite impossible to dissociate and still remain a member in good standing.

History and influence

The movement’s origins go back to the late 1950s and the work of thinker, writer and theologian R.J. Rushdoony. His goal was to “reconstruct” all of society to fit how he understood the Bible. And as I explain in my book, one of his most important strategies for doing that was to eliminate public education and replace it with Christian education.

By establishing the Christian school and Christian home school movements, Christian Reconstructionists brought their version of a biblical worldview to generations of Christians who attended those schools, many of whom had no ties to Christian Reconstructionism itself. The schools taught, and still teach, a curriculum entirely infused with a Christian Reconstruction worldview based on a specific reading of the Bible. History classes become Christian history classes, science classes become the study of creationism, and the study of economics becomes Christian economics.

In the 1970s a Moscow, Idaho, Christian school founder named Doug Wilson, deeply shaped by Christian Reconstruction, expanded his school efforts to include a church, a college, a publishing house and a seminary.

Historian Crawford Gribben also connects Wilson to the earlier Christian Reconstructionist movement. Wilson has said he’s not a Christian Reconstructionist. Nonetheless, he shares their goals and strategies for remaking society according to the Bible.

Wilson also founded the Communion of Reformed Evangelicals, or CREC, and the Association of Classical Christian Schools, or ACCS. CREC is a group of affiliated churches, somewhat like a small denomination, while ACCS, according to its website, exists to “promote, establish, and equip member schools that are committed to a “classical approach” that emphasizes a “Christian worldview” built on Western philosophy and literature.

Wilson and his institutions send out men to start churches and schools modeled after Moscow. These churches and schools work to shape the larger society, according to their reading of the Bible, starting with the U.S., but the goal is to spread this across the world.

The members of Wilson’s community are known as “Kirkers” – based on the Scottish word for church – and include people who move to Moscow to join. Once there, they buy property and set up businesses. Some of the residents of the town, who are not members of the church, call it “an invasion.”

Wilson is an intentionally provocative and controversial figure who got attention early on for his 1996 book “Southern Slavery: As it Was,” which revives pre-Civil War arguments in favor of slavery. He has also been implicated in accusations of abuse, including abuses of power and sexual abuse. A new 2024 podcast, “Sons of Patriarchy,” explains the culture of Wilson’s world through interviews with scholars, other experts and survivors of abuse.

Church government structures ensure conformity

Hegseth hasn’t talked about Christian Reconstructionism directly, but when he talks about education he repeats their talking points. During an interview on a right-wing podcast, he used militaristic language and agreed with the host that “classical Christian schools” could be “boot camps” to provide “recruits” for an underground army that could eventually launch an “educational insurgency.” He laughingly added later the implications of violence in the larger quote are “metaphorical.” Even taken metaphorically, I believe that the comments show him supporting the goal of using Christian schools to make America a Christian nation.

In Tennessee, Hegseth sent his children to a specific Christian school; he then joined a nearby church, both of which are tied to Wilson’s CREC and ACCS.

The structures and informal workings that make up the CREC and ACCS are designed to ensure theological agreement and submission to church leadership, and protect churches from lawsuits when there are accusations of abuse. These aren’t just churches you can join by showing up.

From my research, I know the CREC churches embrace a style of church government where a candidate for membership must go before the elders – called a session – to show that their conversion was authentic and submit to thorough questioning of their theology. They then usually sign a covenant or make a public verbal covenant, submitting to church elders. These practices are common in old presbyterian and reformed style churches. They are less common today in mainline churches, but still exist in smaller Presbyterian denominations.

If people’s beliefs change after becoming members, they can be brought before church courts on heresy charges.

Members must bring any dispute they might have with members of “recognized churches” to these church courts, as opposed to taking them to “worldly” courts. This largely closes off other avenues for addressing grievances.

The governing bodies that comprise the sessions and the courts are all made up of elders. And only men can be elders, a fact that has become an issue in accusations of abuse.

No distinction between religious and political issues

The U.S. has a long tradition of protecting religion from public criticisms: The U.S. Constitution forbids a “religious test” for officeholders, civic groups often prohibit discussions about religion, and it is generally considered impolite to do so in social contexts.

Senators at Hegseth’s confirmation hearings will likely be reluctant to engage in questions about religion, yet in the religious community with which Hegseth has associated himself, there is no distinction between religious issues and political ones; there is no separation of church and state. Every area of life is to be governed by the Bible, and there is no secular sphere of authority that exists apart from religion.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.